Climate Change and Adaptation
Farmers usually understand seasons not just
in terms of the rhythm and regularity of these, but also dramatically in terms
of what is required of them, when the world changes. This often means that when
rain fall patterns change, but then also regularise over a decade, the
adaptation is more than a habit. It is self conscious. It means that the farmer
has accepted the natural disaster when it first occurred, calculated the costs
of its destruction, made sense of fate and mortalities, and now needs to think
of the next step, which is recovery.
This recovery is often painful, as the
families of cotton suicidees in Maharashtra, or rice farmers in Palakkad
communicated, when they could not repay bank loans. In the villages around Leh
city, Ladakh, the farmers were more resilient. They showed that their losses,
personal and collective were part of the way in which they understand the
Buddhist fate. Muslim farmers communicated that they were indeed well looked
after by the local council and by neighbours and the army, though one widow
said no one came to help her, which would be in keeping with census information
that rural widows are often left to fend on their own.
The integrated nature of the village, the
support of neighbourhood, monasteries, army and Kashmir government were
recognised by the cloud burst flood victims of 2010. As the nation watched
aghast on their television screens, houses crumbled and fields and forests were
flooded. The memory of that terrible time, a consequence of climate change is
thus entrenched in the minds of their inhabitants. They remember how they had
to run to the mountains with the little that they had, how cold it was and how
they waited all night before the army arrived. They saw the work of the years
demolished, and the pile up of silt, and worse, the large rocks and boulders
which the water brought in its path from the hillsides. The question of
primeval river beds being revived through the ravages of the flood were known
or told to them by visiting Scientists, but they did not consider it to be
repetition or a pattern of events. They sincerely believed it was a one time
event, a freak event, relating to their karma. The role of geologists has been
to educate the farmers, and to communicate the seriousness of the event, as
falling into a sequence of natural events.
However, to the consternation of the visiting Social Scientists, nobody really believes that they can get hit
twice. This seems an anomaly, but Indians zone in on their religious beliefs to
be cotton wooled from disaster. Maya, destiny, fate: all of this seems to be
the way in which they continue to live in seismic zones and tempt fate. This is
where they were born, this is where they may die, should there be a cloudburst,
an earthquake, war, flood, famine.
More complex however is that the State
builds dams across rivers which are sacred, ecologically sensitive or
supportive of agriculture and communities in the name of a progressive
rationality. Kashmir is punctured by dams which have created the kind of
problems that we associate with the third world, where the Greens Movement
faces the obstacle of State silence over people’s needs. There is no consensus
over what is a democratic principle in nation building.
Since politicians have varied opinions on
what they see as a primary right of citizenship, the people are integrated only
by the love of their land. This is not an unusual state of being, and it comes
with local responsibilities, legends and affections. In Kerala, naad or country
refers to the way in which local principalities, much after Merger with the
Indian State in 1947, still appear as worldviews in themselves. Naad can mean
home, country, village: each of these resonates with the individual,with the
sense of belonging. Medieval though it’s connotation may be, we have to
understand that memories, affections, longings, nostalgia and rights are all
inherent to the understanding of what naad may mean.
In
parts of the Himalayas, people are waging lonely battles against the
State, which regardless of political affiliation of it’s incumbent members, moves towards
industrialisation as a world view. Industrialisation requires generation of
power, and so when rivers are dammed, the water outflow is controlled by the
needs of the dam, not the communities who have for generations lived by the
river. The net out put is considered to be the gains of development.
Development in the 21st century means the fulfilling of the
hedonistic requirements of city dwellers. The promise that the cities will
fulfill all human needs, makes the demographic momentum transform into an
artificial machinery that draws workers in to the city. However, the post
modern city does not provide for the needs of these new urbanites. It shifts
away from the idea that people produce food or artisan goods for the local
market, and to fulfil their own needs; to a new space, unknown in the history
of the third world, though Weber describes it as the escape from feudal tyranny
in medievalism, where people arrive in the city with no thought about where
they will live and how they will work.
What are these jobs they may procure? This is a curious circumstance of the new
postmodern metropolis, which is devoid of an agricultural hinterland.
As a result, a lumpen proletariat emerges
which sees rape and murder as common ways of expressing its collective
dehumanisation. The contexts in which the land mafia, or the nouvea riche also
represents the pathological symptoms of its excessive and lurid desires becomes
the moral landscape in which people live and work. Genocide of the peasantry is
not a long drawn out process. The people are first drawn out from the
countryside, as they are led to believe that climate change and dearth of water
have made agriculture impossible. If there is dearth of water, then why is
there no dearth of dams for generating electricity? The electricity that is
harnessed goes to decorate the streets and hotels and shops of the cities, and
the profligate nature of consumption is more than visible. It is necessary in
this context to understand that artificial economies built on the rapacious
desires of the ever growing middle class in India, which represents itself as a
bourgeois without capital, but imitative of it’s tastes, is dependent on the
State’s urge to be like the West. Sociology grew out of the demeaning contexts
of industrialisation and the problems associated with it. The early history of Capitalism may have been
based in the regulation of desires, but it splayed itself in India through the
rampant desires of people who had been led to belief that crass consumption was
the only stake in the short run, and in the long run everyone dies.
Agriculture has it’s seasons and it’s modes
of production. Yet canal systems of
irrigation can change the way communities think about irrigation has Jyothi
Krishnan has so powerfully shown in her book Enclosed Waters, which is a study
of pond irrigation in Palakkad and it’s enhancement by canal irrigation
supplemented by water pumps. We may presume that water from artificial glaciers
may bring about revolutionary modes of irrigating a cold desert. Potato farmers
in Sabu village, near Leh understand
that the hard work involved in
agricultural production can no longer limit itself to family labour, and
has to employ local or migrant labourers, since the productivity of first
generation farmers is very high. Since the Army is a ready procurer, there is
no difficulty in transportation. For those who do not sell to the Army, they
have to take their produce to Leh town. Part of the problem of growing things
is making out the difference between the costs of production, and the value
that is put on a commodity.
Climate change has brought in a new occupation
in the last two decades, in Ladakh, yet we know that farming is related to
tourism in very specific ways, for organic foods are the key index to the
discerning customer of what is most desirable in the exotica of travel. In
Kerala, the state provides agriculture several kinds of support: rice lands may
not be sold for construction, organic farming is supported, terrace gardening
and intensive gardening will be given every possible support. Agricultural
societies are the spine of the tourist industry, including dependent artisanal
and fishing and sea related activities receiving the same kind of assurance of
state attention. In mountain regions, the problem that Chhering Tandup has
always asserted is that of movement of goods. How do we ascertain that the farm
produce from Leh reaches its metropolitan outlets, such as Chandigarh and
Delhi?
There is a problem here. As many as the
trucks that arrive in Leh, the greater the degree of pollution. The greater the
loss of the natural habitat, and the extent of damage will be difficult to
assess. If geologists say that whatever glacial damage or melt is due to
activities that occurred 7 million years ago, then we may rest assured that the
sending in of trucks to Leh from Chandigarh and Delhi would mean the erosion of
these very new and constantly developing mountains faster than 7 years. When
the Coimbatore-Palakkad pass, developed into a conduit for vegetable marketing,
a consequence of the market gardening from Tamil Nadu reaching Kerala, the
forests in that area disappeared in a short period of time. The Tamils, because of colonial intervention
and the splicing of rivers in their favour became excellent farmers. The
Malayalis who were dependent on slave castes to irrigate and sow and harvest
lost their motivation to farm because of professionalization and the Gulf
migration, since that was more lucrative than growing pepper or rice, plantains
or areca nut. With the shift to information technology, in cities like Cochin and Trivandrum, Kerala
has become cosmopolitanised to the extent of rampantly overbuilding for new
workers and their automobile needs. With the promised coach factory, the low
profile town of Palakkad will become even busier and noisier.
In 2006, Palakkad had verdant woods,
visible from the highway, but by 2014, the snaking chain of lorries made the
road barren and impossible to commute, so a second road for those travelling to
the Coimbatore airport was built, which cut
through paddy fields, and country houses, with sporadic signboards of
Arrack on the way, since it was customary for workers to be alcohol - dependent
on toddy between spells of work. What industrialisation can mean is that local
consumption of food and beverages is replaced by alcohol and drug abuse, which
is always blamed on migrant labour, or on tourists. The work of a new
generation of scholars, such as Sumera Shafi and Tashi Lundup for Leh show how
increased wealth from tourism has brought about substantial changes in world view of the youth.
Why
agricultural practise in the surrounding villages of Leh is extremely
interesting is because it is new, and instinctive, since with the planting of
trees by the Army precipitation is conclusive a symptom of new world policies.
The soil is alluvial and very rich.
Interior colonialism, including constantly, the emphatic presence of the
Army, since 60 percent of the army is
stationed here, is not seen to be a cultural colonialism. Protection from
China, and assimilation into China is not desired by Ladakhis. Unlike Kashmir,
where the Army is deeply resented for it’s very visible coercive arm, Ladakhis have a tolerant and supportive
relation to the presence of the Indian army of which they too are a part.
Employment in the Army is a definitive occupation for Ladakhis.
Agriculture sustains the Army, whether it
is apricots, potatoes, beans, asparagus, grapes, apples, tomatoes or leeks.
Tourism and the Army are two of the stable institutions of the Ladakh region.
Kashmiri merchants now face the inherent space of competition from Ladakhi
craftspeople and merchants. That pashmina is manufactured in Leh was in doubt,
until a new generation of scholars from Jammu University brought to collective
attention the presence of local boutiques and pashmina wool curing factory.
Surely, climate change is part of the way in which new processes are brought
into focus with regard to the dangers and losses that climate change present,
where equally, new avenues present themselves. The pashmina sheep died after
the 2010 cloud burst because of the loss of pastoral grounds. Yet, the supply
of Pashmina did not abate according to the manager of the factory, because the
supply of wool continued to come from other areas in Ladakh, who was very
confident that he could get his sources come what may. This is the curious
aspect of Agriculture and related artisan activities: whatever the nature of loss,
the beneficence continues. How do we deal with redistribution of goods is what
industrial systems have not dealt with. The industrial imagination is so bereft
of the sense of the future, that they do not have the way of dealing with the
bonus of nature. Crop destruction is part of capitalism, by letting grains to
rot, the industrial system makes sure that prices are inflated. By buying up
from the farmer without ensuring redistribution, it leaves the farmer with cost
price, and a rupee’s profit on every kilo, while ensuring that granaries burst
and the prime minister and the Reserve Bank congratulate the farmers. Surplus
crops means a stable economy, since post office and SBI keep the peasant
earnings in sync with subsistence agriculture which is generally against
Conspicuous Consumption. However, the capitalists look to conspicuous
consumption for an active market, and the circulation of money, so they do all
they can to disrupt the basic socialist
(a constitutional term) practise of the Indian economy, which is in the
very nature of social relations. Since
no redistribution takes place, after goods are cornered by the Government the
food rots. Establishment social
scientists believe that two and a half acres is impractical and that
industrialised farming to feed the billions is possible only after the farmers
are dispossessed, brought to the city to build smart cities which do not
include them. Here they are kept in poverty, below the minimum wage, as the
contractors subtract the costs of bringing them to the city. The Leh district
farmers have shown that farming is enjoyable and that they eat well and have
enough for others, if the Army is not the only buyer. In Tiruvannamalai, Tamil
Nadu pilgrimage and tourism has been supported through the interlinkage of
local cafes with the rural markets of the hinterland hill stations in the
Nilgiris.
Sociologists do not have a solution for climate change. They
cannot tell the victims of flood that this has nothing to do with good
governance or bad, or with ritual purity, or Allah’s grace, or Siva’s wrath.
This has to do with geological timings of catastrophes, which does not match
human or historical time. While Leh survived the flash flood, it’s town and
village councils have a lot to do with the rehabilitation measures. Its
autonomous hill councils’ functioning helped the villagers because of the level
of trust, and the close and personal regulation of water in the villages helped
for further development of its agriculture techniques. Each family sends a
representative in turn to sleep by the village pond to control water
utilization and possible theft at night.
There is a lot that we
can learn from the Ladakh experience of organisation and technique, made
possible too from the lessons which the local intelligentsia brings to us
through intimacy and translation. Such a grass roots intelligentsia is yet to
develop in Kashmir to reckon with its
own needs. Painful though this period is, the velocity of distress has its
anodyne, the creation of institutional dialogue, which is community inclusive,
rather than separatist. Just as Ahmedabad burned in 2002, without any
administrative attention, and Delhi too, during the Sikh genocide, both of which were humanly created disasters,
three days, after the 2014 September floods,
the people in Kashmir waited for the Administration and for Government
help, including the Army. The Government said, “We can do nothing.” Why was
that? Should they not be accountable for what they do or do not do? People’s
governance and people’s autonomy must mean that villages and towns must have an
immediately recognisable task force to generate support during disasters. It
must also mean that the State and the World Bank, is implicated in the
disasters, (which called Natural are usually exaggerated by human culpability,)
when it supports dam construction,
against the wishes of the local people. They must work with the resource materials garnered by the local
intelligentsia, recognise local expertise for its ability to warn capitalism
and capitalists of its implication in these massive disasters in seismic zones.
Rajinder Singh in his
letter of July 16th 2013, ( attached with this paper) asked that the
wishes of the people be attended to. Fault becomes allocated when there are
tribunals of enquiry. However, in the case of large scale development, the
Gandhians constantly assert that poverty alleviation is not possible with mass
scale destruction of people’s livelihoods. Rather than flight from the State,
the struggle against interior colonialisms has been protracted. The
alternative view to modernism, is post
modernism, which has its freedom to choice, and to resistance of oppression.
The so called subsistence societies of pre-modern contexts made sure that it’s
people were fed, and provided for in times of stress. Central Rule often excludes the domination of
those societies which are intrinsically, self sustaining. James C Scott writes that “I emphasise the
term political order to avoid conveying the mistaken impression
that outside the realm of the state lay mere disorder. Depending on the
location and date, such units might range from nuclear families to segmentary
lineages, bilateral kindreds, hamlets, larger villages, towns and their
immediate hinterlands, and confederations of such towns. Confederations appear
to constitute the most complex level of integration that had any stability at
all.” (Scott 2010:36)
In Federal societies,
the States are each given autonomy
regarding the choices they make about those decisions pertaining to local
communities. Kerala for instance has a Fisheries Ministry, and also supports
organic farming as a specific instance of this motivation. When certain States
are oil rich or mineral rich, then they become the colonized space of political
intentions. “State power, in this
conception, is the state’s monopoly of coercive force that must, in principle,
be fully projected to the very edge of it’s territory, where it meets, again in
principle, another sovereign power, projecting it’s command to it’s own adjacent
frontier. ….As a practical matter, most nation-states have tried, insofar as
they had the means, to give substance to this vision, establishing armed border
posts, moving loyal populations to the frontier and relocating or driving away
‘disloyal’ populations , clearing frontier lands for sedentary agriculture,
building roads to the borders, and registering hitherto fugitive peoples.” (
ibid 11) Quite often, Scott argues, the populations at the borders are
culturally syncretistic, and they are then forced to conform with the
homogeneity of the political order in the plains. “Where they could, however,
all states in the region have tried to bring such peoples under their routine
administration, to encourage and more rarely, to insist upon linguistic,
cultural, and religious alignment with the majority population at the state
core.” (ibid 12)
When there is a dramatic contrast between subsistence
societies, located in proximity to market towns, with the industrializing motif
of traditional development politics, which aggrandizes and hierarchises, we
find that local communities survive through varieties of camaflouge. Tradition
persists in customs of food, dress and ritual, but there is a segmental aspect,
so the coding in of plural forms of identity are implicit. People become home
in many different cultures simultaneously. They take on the colours of their
environment, merging effortlessly into the work world, and into the
recreational structures of multiple societies. This multi causality is
represented through coincidental forms of association and unionization both at
work, and in leisure, so whether it is the club or the association, individuals
know how to fit in the rural milieu as well as the urban one. This is not
oscillation but a dialectic. In transition societies this is made possible by
the dual languages which are learnt, but when industrialization is complete,
then these skills of language and
technique are lost. It is this which makes people truly homeless.
In
this last part of the paper, I will discuss the plea from Prof Bharat
Jhunjhunwala, on behalf of the villagers of Chamoli, where the World Bank is
making its loan available, against the wishes of the people, for damming the
Ganga, for purposes of electricity generation for the cities.
The game,
for the manipulations between agriculturists and the colonial state in
the formative years of sedentarisation of agriculture in British ruled India
continues. The rules are not laid down by the colonists, but by the way in
which the people demarcate their own borders and territories. “Naturally,
therefore, most of the actions of the players in the “game” were largely
predictable since the players had trained each other over a long period of
time. Not only were the actions of the players anticipated, but each contestant
had prepared himself (most of these players were men) psychically for the
outcome as well.” (Irschick 1994:46)
To be represented in Kashmir, by the
village councils of Ladakh is a task in itself, requiring the notation of
religion, race, locality, occupation, community and its common subjectivities.
In other parts of the Himalayas, the people orient themselves to petitions, law
court cases and hope in citizenship. With the recent floods in Kashmir, the
equation between the people and the Centre will change, primarily because the
devastation is so huge that the orientations will be to everyday survival. The
balance of power rests with the ability to withstand neglect and philanthrophy,
both of which are deemed to be ways of hierarchizing the free. Why India is
substantially free inspite of it’s poverty and it’s corruption is because land
held in agriculture is on an average two and a half acres, and the industrialising state would love to
club it together to facilitate the growing of gmt products under the guise that
the farmer with small landholdings is an anomaly.
Traditional small acreage and production of
bumper crops annually is substantially
different from Pakistan, where twenty two families controlled the country
through their agricultural landlordship.
The damming of the Indus was for industrial purposes and the travails of
Pakistan have come from protracted militarisation, tribal revolt and
non-democratic practise regarding the fate of peasants and local communities.
The gap between the rich and the poor has led to substantial distress, which
includes the mobilisation of religious fundamentalists to repress freedom of
citizens.
TK Oommen’s work “From Mobilisation to
Institutionalisation” showed the success of the land distribution Act in the
1950s to be partially successful since the land given away was usually
rocky. In contrast, what the farmers in
the environment of Leh have shown however,
is that the resilience that they have as farmers with small
landholdings, has depended on their hard work in tilling and watering in
tightly regulated circumstances. The village councils have a say in how the
water is allocated around the clock. In Palakkad, which became known as the
rice belt of Kerala, the water from the local small dam, Mallapuram Dam becomes
readily available to farmers in the winter months, not so in the summer, when
the primary objective is to provide drinking water to a fast expanding city.
The fluctuations of production are obvious to farmers, whose one, two or three crops
of paddy are dependent on irrigation, since the ponds become neglected, and
with climate change can run dry.
Emile Durkheim writes, in his comparison of
Communism and Socialism, that the former has a moral principle, which abstracts
private property to be a lapse of conduct arising from selfishness and
immorality, but Socialism is a functional principle of the division of labour
and practical economic interests.
“The two problems are entirely different.
On one side, you set out to judge the moral value of wealth in the abstract,
and deny it; on the other, one asks whether a kind of commerce and industry
harmonizes with the conditions of existence of the peoples practising it, and
if it is normal or unhealthy. Thus while communism concerns itself only accessorily
with so-called economic arrangements and modifies them only to the degree
necessary to place them in keeping with
its principle (the abolition of individual ownership), socialism, inversely,
touches private property the degree required to change it so that it may
harmonize with the economic arrangement
– the essential objects of its demands.” (Durkheim 1962:73)
Socialism is inherent in what Marcel Mauss
showed to be forms of tribalism, or more generally the collective life of communities. However, in
the case of the “Seasonal Variations Among the Eskimo” or the pastoral
practises of the Nuer in the 1930s, as studied by Evans Pritchard, we do have
interesting views of how social exchange takes place during nomadism, and when
people congregate during winter, in the first case, and heavy rains in the
second. Hunting and fishing are typical activities during nomadism, and with
seasonal shifts, there is a dependence on local activities which are centred
around storage and rituals. In the Ladakh region, the storage of fruit and
tubers and the dried meats allow people to engage in a very sustained
ceremonial and ritual life when the borders and roads shut down. The
effervescence of collective life is more than evident. Climate change has to
take into account increased melting of glaciers as the way in which the Spring
may come earlier, but the long term effects on local habitation are yet to be
understood. People do not live in fear of the future, they adapt to the
present, and in a democratic system, agriculturists should be protected not
left to the vagaries of industrial imaginations, which nullify them by the
habit of four hundred years. Coexistence of the agricultural and industrial
worlds is provided by the Constitution, which has its Gandhian undertones in
citizen rights.
I
close with a summary of the plea to the
World Bank, from Prof Jhunjhuwala who with other signatories, has claimed that
the continual damming of the Ganga will influence the fate of the Himalayas in
general. They write to the Executive Secretary of the Inspection Panel of the
World Bank, that the Pipalkoti project will change their lives because the
“joys of a free flowing river” cannot be estimated. Further, the river does not
flow past boulders in the case of damming, and will lose its medicinal and
therapeutic qualities. According to the petitioners, the people living in
Chamoli district, on the banks of the Alaknanda Ganga will not have access to
fish and sand, as resources for their livelihood. The Cheer Pheasant, an
endangered bird will go extinct. The release of water at odd times during the
day for generation of electricity will affect the lives of people who belong to
a riverine civilisation and are dependent on nature for their livelihood. Houses which are near the dam develop cracks
because of the force of construction and water flow in the tunnels and pipes.
Accumulation of silt affects the lives of communities who are dependent on the
river such as fishers and pastoralists. The collection of silt can affect the
social and religious life of people who can no longer bathe or pray, or collect
water. The aquatic life, both plants and animals becomes disturbed. Very often,
the rivers run dry. The dust from construction pollutes every thing. Workers
live in terrible conditions. Disease becomes rampant. Women and children lose their freedoms. The
earthquakes further damage the hollowed out mountains, causing landslides and
death. The 2013 floods in Uttarakhand were a consequence of ravaged hillsides
for short term gains, in a seismic zone. Water sources are drying up, rivers
are degraded to the point of becoming extinct. Heat from construction sends up
the indexes of global warming. The increase in populations due to construction
and deforestation leads to the mass loss of habitat for animal populations
which begin to wander causing threat, in turn, to local communities and
habitats. Worst of all, there is silence on the part of bureaucrats, and the
people are kept out of information and discussion. (Jhunjhunwala 2013, petititon
to World Bank)
As the contents of the letter show, the
real questions we need to ask are about the management of our rivers as
commons. The Indus is dammed substantially in Pakistan, where it flows in
India, it has become both a ritual site for Hindus asserting identity politics,
as well as for the urbane leisured class who looks forward to playing golf in
the highest reaches of the Himalayas. How do we understand these cultural uses.
Do we have a say in the right to life, and the right to traditional grazing
grounds. As Scientists and Social Scientists, may we presume that people’s
liberties are of the most importance, and by writing about them we delay their
extinction or forced assimilation.
Acknowledgements: Cherring Tandup, Tashi
Lundup, Sumera Shafi, Suresh Babu, Renoj
Theyyan, Devinder Singh and the entire
student team from Jammu University, for their hospitality and kindness and
friendship, many thanks!
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