What To 'Expect' From The New West Bengal Government

 BY ANURADHA TALWAR

A couple of days after the election, I was asked me to write about what I “expect” from this second term TMC government. Expectations can be both positive and negative. So, what should one write? After puzzling over this for a couple of hours, I have decided to write both — about what we hope for and what we dread from past experience. So here it goes ….

This new Government should, first of all, concentrate on creation of honest ways of earning a living. So far, the only notable job created by them in their last term was through the recruitment of 1.3 lakh young men and women as civic police. As the High Court has rightly observed, the entire process of recruitment smacked of adhocism, nepotism and corruption. MLAs and police officials are rumoured to have made packets from bribes paid by these desperate young men and women. The employment they received was ill paid, irregular and risky, and even worse, morally corrupting. These young people were made to do all the dirty work by regular police – bully innocent people into paying a bribe, demand protection money from illicit liquor dens, stand at cross roads with the traffic police to collect a couple of rupees from each lorry etcetera.

The other job available for young people was to enter the “money market” – to glibly convince people with small savings and big greed to double or triple their money in dubious schemes of chit funds. Many of these young people are now being hounded by those who have lost all their money. Some have been forced into hiding, some have committed suicide, others live in dread of the depositors — not a very good way to build the character of our youth, you will agree.

Then, of course, there was the option of joining a syndicate and extorting money from people — tolabazi — by flexing your political muscle. In Birpara, in North Benga,l they even have a special name for this illegal act, making it almost respectable – they call it GT or Goonda Tax!

If you were too decent or frightened to do all this, there was the last option of working as a migrant worker in Kerala or Tamil Nadu, leaving home and hearth, and using one’s energies to develop another part of our country instead of one’s own neighbourhood.

The TMC, in its last term, excelled in providing doles to people. The closer the election came, the larger became these freebies. The workers of Jessop have been protesting for 5-6 years, wanting re-opening of their factory and steps to stop Ruia, the owner, from stripping their factory. Just a couple of days before the Model Code of Conduct came into force, the State Government declared that it would give Rs 10,000 per month to every worker. No mention has been made of the future of the factory or of protecting its property from stealing and stripping by the owner. Bigger sops — such as shoes and cycles for all school going children (never mind if some of them already had shoes or cycles!) — were also given. Compensation for crop loss due to rain and Cyclone Aila (which took place in 2010) was also distributed just before the elections. The State Government began providing rice and wheat at Rs 2 a kg under the National Food Security Act in February 2016. The implementation of an Act that was passed in 2013 was delayed till just before the election for no compelling reason.

That this strategy was a vote getter is clear from the election results. However, let us now see the new Government spend some money on schemes which are long term and which can have a telling impact on people’s lives and development.

What we need most of all is decent employment. We do not need the Tatas and their like to invest in large-scale industry, with a repeat of Singur, with coercive displacement and minimum job creation. We need investment in agriculture-based industry, in small and medium-scale industry, in tea, in jute, in engineering, where smaller investments create more jobs and where the produce of our own state is well utilised.

We invest lakhs of our tax money in educating young people in Government schools and universities. And then we leave them to a callous job market, with frustration as their future. On the other hand, we need paramedics, vets, paralegal workers, teachers, agricultural expertise etcetera for village people. When 100 days of work has been guaranteed for those willing to do manual labour, let the State Government now guarantee work such as teaching, medical work, veterinary work, agriculture etcetera at minimum wages for our young, educated youth. Let them provide much needed services in rural areas. Why should policing, cheating and extortion be the only means for these bright young people to earn a living?

Another thing that the TMC has excelled in is in turning democracy on its head. The Panchayat Act has provisions for a Gram Sansad meeting with all voters at the booth level that legally gives them the powers twice a year to plan for their village’s development and to check on the Panchayat’s accounts. During the Left Front’s rule, many of these meetings became a farce with false signatures and adjourned meetings. During the TMC’s regime, they have not only remained a farce, they have become a rarity. This upside-down democracy has been accompanied by violence and the use of false cases to intimidate any opposition — a potent mix that was invented by the Left Front and has been perfected by the TMC.

The TMC should atone for its past sins by passing amendments to the Panchayat Act, making these Gram Sansad meetings mandatory monthly affairs without which funds for development will not be passed onto the elected Panchayat. It should also amend the law to make the right to recall a reality — let the voters have the right to call back their representative if he or she does not function properly. Let the voters be true participants in the development of their villages, instead of just pawns whose votes are manipulated once in five years through freebies and fear.

Last but not least, there remain half-finished works from the previous term — a committee for minimum wages for tea workers was formed in 2015. It still has to declare the legal, minimum wage for tea workers. Domestic workers are now a part of the employment for which the State Government must declare a legal minimum wage, but no such wage has been declared. The National Food Security Act (NFSA) remains half done – people in Purulia and temporary or bigha workers living in tea gardens have still not got ration cards. The management of tea gardens is quietly passing off Government-given rations under the NFSA as rations given by the management, and is reducing the “food grains component” of the meagre wages they pay to workers.

Theft of wages under NREGA is reaching gigantic proportions — job card holders are told by the powers–that-be (the political goons in their village) that Rs 5,000 has been deposited in their bank account, without their doing any work at all. The job card holder is asked to withdraw the total amount, keep Rs 500 for himself and give the rest to his political God. The job card holder is happy, as are the political touts in his village. The height of decentralisation of corruption, don’t you think? It is the new Government’s job to stop such corruption.

So, what we want the Government to do has been listed above. But what do we actually expect? Unless some miracle happens, we expect a continuation of extortion by ruling party members at the grass roots, with the ‘let’s get rich quick’ being the main mantra. We expect a continuation of rule through a mix of doles, violence, false cases and fear. We expect apathy and fear amongst common people, with their role in society and politics being limited to voting once in five years and keeping their mouths shut.

Though I am not a great believer in prayer, perhaps we should all pray for a miracle of good governance in the second term of this Government. Only a miracle can change things.

A Bengali version of the article was published at Ei Samay.

'W.Bengal Needs To Move From Adhocism To Food Security Act'

BY ANURADHA TALWAR

Political analysts have almost unanimously said that freebies were a major factor for the Trinamool Congress’s huge win in the 2016 Assembly elections in West Bengal. Cheap rice for almost everyone, cycles and shoes for school-going children, money for crop damage – all of these added to their votes.

Clearly enthused by this, the state’s Food and Civil Supplies Minister, Jyotipriya Mullick, has announced that a Ramzan package of chick peas, flour and sugar will be available at a subsidised rate through the public distribution system till June 24. Just in case he was accused of minority appeasement, Mullick followed it up with one more announcement: that there would be a similar package for Durga Puja later this year.

The Ramzan and Durga Puja packages are not the first of their kind. Special food packages have been announced time and again – for festivals or after disasters. The problem with these packages is that they are for short periods of time. Before ration card holders become aware of them, the schemes end. As a result, very few ration card holders actually pick up these special rations. Instead, the rations find their way into the black market with ration shop dealers acting in collusion with some Food Department officials.

Before the National Food Security Act was implemented, rice and wheat rations for Above Poverty Line families were provided in an equally ad hoc and irregular manner, and most of these food grains used to find their way to the black market as the consumer had no idea about the quantity or when rations would be given.

When ration dealers benefit

The ration dealer always reaps extra profits when quantities are broken up into many different categories and prices are not in round numbers. When this happens, consumers get confused and are easily cheated.

While the system has been simplified considerably after the implementation of the National Food Security Act, West Bengal still has five categories of ration cards and ration packages are priced oddly. For instance, in Jangal Mahal, wheat flour packets weighing 750 gm are priced at Rs 2.62 in ration shops. At a time, when it is difficult to find 50 paise or even Re 1 coins, how will customers or ration shop dealers return 38 paise as change?

What succeeds best is a rationing system with just one or two categories of cards and easily remembered and rounded-off prices and quantities.

In his Ramzan package statement, Mullick also said that “the government would continue with Rs 2 per kg rice for all during this period [emphasis added].”

Is this his way of saying that the Rs 2 rice scheme can be withdrawn later?

Under the National Food Security Act, the Centre gives the state government rice at Rs 3 per kg for 6.01 crore people. The state provides a further subsidy of Re 1 per kg and sells the rice for Rs 2 per kg. In addition to this, the state government has two cheap rice schemes under the Rajya Khadya Suraksha Yojana – RKSY 1 and RKSY 2 – which cover an additional 1.7 crore people.
While the entitlements of beneficiaries under the National Food Security Act are legally guaranteed, the extra Re 1 subsidy and the state’s RKSY schemes are part of Bengal’s pre-election largesse. There is no legal assurance to back these up. In fact, there are already reports of pre-election related rations being discontinued (for instance in Ward No 21 of Barasat city in North 24 Parganas.)

After the Trinamool Congress first seized power in the state in 2011, the Food and Supplies Department website of the West Bengal government for many days carried the slogan: Food For All. This was their principal promise to the people.

Streamline rations

If this is indeed what the Mamata Banerjee government wants, it should move away from the adhocism of Ramzan and Durga Puja packages and Rajya Khadya Suraksha Yojanas. The government should instead pass a State Food Security Act that guarantees rice at Rs 2 per kg for all citizens.

Also, if the government is seriously concerned about malnutrition and its impact on people’s health, it should provide subsidised cooking oil and pulses in addition to cheap food grains to improve diets with proteins and fats. This has already been ordered by the Supreme Court for drought-hit areas in the Swaraj Abhiyan case.

The state government should also start taking measures to help farmers produce food. It should ensure that distress sale amongst farmers stops by arranging for doorstep procurement of food grains, pulses and oil seeds at remunerative prices. Without such measures, food production is becoming a loss-making enterprise. Distress migration from our villages to other states and frustration amongst unemployed are becoming major problems.
 
The chief minister and her food and civil supplies minister should remember that the elections are over as is the time for short-term, populist, vote-catching packages. Instead, the government should back up its cheap rice schemes with a Food Security Act, which will ensure food grains, pulses and cooking oil at subsidised prices for all. It should also invest in agriculture and give legal procurement at remunerative prices to farmers to ensure food production.

This article was originally printed at Scroll.in

This Is No Storm In A Teacup

Guest Post by Harsh Mander

[The sudden withdrawal by some tea plantation managements in North Bengal of not just regular employment, but also all a series of life-enabling services is proving to be nothing short of catastrophic for workers.]

A largely invisible, grim, humanitarian crisis, of mounting hunger, looms over several thousand North Bengal tea garden workers. Duncans, a leading tea company with 15 plantations in Darjeeling and the Himalayan foothills, has plunged its workers into a precarious state of illegal limbo. It has neither formally closed its gardens nor is it running operations normally, with devastating consequences for the survival and future of around 15,000 workers and their families.

The company began tea operations in India in 1857, clearing large swathes of dense forests in North Bengal to establish its extensive tea plantations. With other British plantation companies, it transported industrious tribal people from Chota Nagpur and Santal Parganas as indentured, near-slave labour. After Independence, ownership of these companies gradually passed into Indian hands. Although nominally free now, workers continued to work in near-colonial conditions. The dependence and submissiveness of the workers was partly secured by paying part-wages in kind, as food rations, housing and health services. Until recently, most tea worker households were not even issued Public Distribution System (PDS) ration cards. Instead, State governments supplied PDS grain to companies to issue to workers.

In these conditions, if tea garden managements suddenly withdraw these supplies, workers are left singularly defenceless and precarious. The first such crisis was thrust upon workers of 30 tea gardens in North Bengal in 2003-04, when they were illegally closed and abandoned overnight by owners who no longer found them to be commercially viable. Instead of first securing the interests of the workers and gardens, they simply disappeared. On my visits to the gardens at that time, I found several worker households facing conditions of actual starvation.

A similar situation has arisen today with the illegal semi-closure of 15 gardens by Duncans. Early in 2015, the management abruptly stopped paying wages to its workers. It also terminated food rations. It cut electricity and drinking water supplies to worker colonies. For several years, pensions and provident funds had not been paid. Gardens were not maintained, and ageing, unproductive tea bushes, some a hundred years old, were not replaced. Workers’ houses were not maintained for years. Workers allege both apathy and runaway corruption by the management.

Such illegal semi-closure would jeopardise critically the future of workers in any industry. But tea worker communities have been brought up for generations in forced direct dependence on the management even for basic essentials such as food, clean drinking water, housing and health care. For them, sudden withdrawal by the management of not just regular employment, but also all these life-enabling services, is nothing short of catastrophic.

I found workers surviving by travelling to neighbouring gardens and working at low, piece-work rates. These garden managements are profiting from their distress; they pick them up in buses for which they are charged, and workers are forced to spend longer hours to earn far less in uncertain casual employment, with no job security or additional benefits. Others are mining stones on riverbeds and several younger workers have migrated to Bhutan, Kerala, Delhi and Tamil Nadu. Children are dropping out of school and joining the workforce to bring some food to the table. Adding to worker distress, many are dependent on untreated stream water for drinking. No Duncan tea estate has a functioning hospital since 2000: without doctors, medicine, and occasionally a nurse.

Those we found most threatened by hunger were single women, those ailing and the elderly. Phulo Munda, for instance, is a widow of 57 years. As a permanent worker, she earned around Rs.1,600 a month. But since the undeclared closure, she has received no wages. She has only one meal a day. When strong enough, she trudges to the river bed to break stones, for which she gets Rs.70 a week. For August 2015, she earned just Rs.150. The condition of her house is appalling, with virtually no walls. The wooden pillars to support the tin roof were also bought by her. When it rains, she squats with an umbrella inside the house, awake the whole night. Every day she walks 3 kilometres to fetch drinking water, and collects firewood from the forests nearby. Food, fuel and housing were all guaranteed in the past by the management.

This purgatory situation of semi-closure is patently illegal, but labour officials and trade unions have done little to hold the management and owners accountable. The State government has also not started wage work or restored health care, drinking water or electricity in worker habitations. In the inverse government morality of our times, States defend morally and legally culpable failures by wealthy plantation owners and their corrupt and inept managements. Workers are left defenceless, thrown to the edge of survival. 

Harsh Mander is a human rights worker, writer and teacher

(This article was originally published in The Hindu)

 

Travesty Of Tea And Tribals

By Sushovan Dhar

No amount of mockery would have been more pronounced than the holding of the Tea and Tribal Festival at Banarhat, in the Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal, under the “auspices” of the Backward Classes Welfare Department, Government of West Bengal. The programme held between February 15-17, 2015, intends to “provide a platform to display tribal talents” said the official invitation. This charade is emblematic of the larger spoof that continues with around two million tea plantation workers of India.

The venue, Banarhat Tea Garden playground, is located within 15 kilometers of the closed Red Bank, Dharanipur and Surendranagar Tea Estates that have been virtually shut down since the last 12 years. These nondescript locations sometimes hit headlines when starvation and chronic malnutrition take the lives of the closed tea garden workers and their family members. The otherwise picturesque Dooars, at the foothills of the Himalayan West Bengal and Bhutan, has turned into a veritable valley of death with tea garden workers suffering due to low wages, poor quality rations and inadequate medical facilities. It is a shame and matter of utter disgust that the government, instead of bringing the real culprits to book, decides to organise a festival that makes fun of the dead. And not one or ten, but thousands of deaths due to malnutrition, starvation and undernourishment. Matters that could have otherwise been easily prevented.

According to a survey done on body mass index (BMI) by rights activist and doctor Binayak Sen and five other organisations, in the erstwhile closed Raipur tea garden in the same district, “40 per cent of its residents have a BMI lower than 18.5, indicative of being underweight, and 140 people in 539 examined had BMI lower than 14, a sign of malnourishment”. The report points towards the dire living conditions in the closed tea gardens in West Bengal and exposes the sub-human conditions that people are compelled to endure.

Turning a deaf ear to such alarming developments, the Trinamool Government in the state - (in)famous for its ardent mela culture where millions of rupees are disbursed in extravagance –  tries to showcase its “talents” leaving the tribals and the tea-workers in a quandary. Critics say that these melas or fairs are organised to conceal the failures of the government and also dish out money to local beneficiaries and contractors. Besides, these are great public propaganda exercises for a party in a desperate need to repair its tarnished image owing to unfulfilled expectations and widespread corruption though multiple scams, including the Saradha ponzi scheme, has hit the government so hard that its image seems beyond repair. The party can only hope to stay in power with the opposition votes squarely shared between the CPI(M) and the BJP, as testified by the recent assembly and parliamentary by-polls in Krishnagunj and Bongaon respectively.

While workers reel under pathetic wages, currently Rs 90-95/day, the ministers of the government including the one in charge of labour, resort to falsehood about improving the lot of the labourers and the implementation of minimum wages in the sector. This enclave economy has witnessed notorious collusions between the owners and the successive governments reducing the workers to penury, permanently. Even in the face of a strong and unified resistance from workers the government takes the mantle of dragging them into dubious wage deals that would see their hard-won gains further eroded. Any Lady Macbeth to say- “Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”?

In a landmark judgment on Kamani Metals & Alloys Ltd vs Their Workmen, the Supreme Court of India on 24 January 1967 ruled that “a minimum wage which, in any event, must be paid, irrespective of the tent of profits, the financial condition of the establishment or the availability of workmen on lower wages. This minimum wage is independent of the kind of industry and applies to all alike big or small. It sets the lowest limit below which wages cannot be allowed to sink in all humanity.” The government is resolute to connive with the tea-garden owners to violate every word and spirit of this opinion. West Bengal is the only “owner's pride” in the country after the neighbouring Assam government, also notorious for gross violations of workers’ rights, issued necessary notifications towards the implementation of minimum wages, last month. Let us not forget that the health of the tea industry depends a great deal on the health of the workers as this is highly a labour intensive industry.

And the timing could not be better with the industry poised to witness tea prices climbing by 9% to an average of Rupees 200 ($3.2) per kg in 2015 as consumption rises in a recovering economy, according to McLeod Russel India, the world's biggest tea grower. ASSOCHAM, the oldest and a leading apex-body of the trade associations of India, projected the industry to achieve a turnover of Rs. 33,000 crore ($5.4 billion) by this year making plantation owners richer and leaving workers earn the lowest wage of all organized sectors in the country.

Surely, the government has to resort to such travesty to woo the plantation workers and the tribals. And, no wonder there is hardly any turnout of lesser mortals to witness such a farce.

To Fukushima With Love!

[A guest post by Satya Sagar]

Here is an idea, which not too far into the future will rank as perhaps the finest to emerge in the entire 21^st Century. And not just because this is going to be the shortest Century the human species ever enjoyed on this planet, thanks to Fukushima.  The idea is to send all the supporters of nuclear power from around the globe to the stricken Japanese nuclear complex to help plug the great leak from the sputtering reactors there.

Now isn’t that a sparkling thought – all the champions of nuclear power marching off to help clean up the holy mess created by their beloved industry? A hundred thousand beaming pro-nukes working shoulder to shoulder, pumping water into the reactor core, shifting the spent fuel with their brave and bare hands, absorbing the radiation that would otherwise go into the atmosphere and from there around the globe.

Come on guys, don’t say ‘no thanks’. This is the moment you have all been waiting for. Your moment under the sun, the sun of course now covered by a lovely cloud of radioactive iodine, caesium and plutonium. Finally you seem to have achieved your dream of deep frying the entire planet and its population with a technology you never tired of calling both ‘safe’, ‘clean’ and in recent times ‘green’ too.

Here is the chance to prove that your love for everything nuclear was not just loose, armchair talk. Here is also the time to finally nail the canard that nuclear power always meant the electricity went to the elites while some poor indigenous folk somewhere had to deal with disposal of the radioactive wastes generated.

You can show the world that you are made of sterner stuff- that your heart is clad with zirconium stronger than the one that seems to have cracked at the Dai-ichi plant. That the wonderful engineering you promoted for decades may have once again proved to be flawed but the science behind it is still very sound. As we see now, unfortunately it is very heat and light too.

What a grand spectacle it would make – the scores of nuclear industry enthusiasts: Russian, Chinese, American, Indian, Japanese, whatever – saving the world from cataclysm by putting their well-paid lives on the line.  What are a few gamma rays after all –  equivalent perhaps to having a CT scan done every half a second – think of the great photo opportunity? Imagine the fantastic see-through images we can hang on our walls after it is all over and your profession will finally be hailed as the most transparent on our planet.

You are damn right – those fifty-odd underpaid Japanese contract workers trying to stop the meltdown in Fukushima know nothing at all. Imagine walking straight into radioactive water with slippers on!  They are just some dumb blokes suckered into becoming the latest kamikaze at the service of the Japanese industrial empire. Sure, they are being hailed as ‘heroes’ for what they are doing but if they are allowed to continue like this the rest of us are going to be zeroes anyway!

What is really required in their place now is the urgent presence of all those highly qualified professors, scientists, engineers and pro-nuke media plugs from around the globe at Fukushima. The events in Japan call for the direct involvement of all those who have made a nice living out of peddling nuclear power as the solution to everything from global poverty to galloping climate change.

It is time for all of them to leave the safe confinements of the television talk shows they keep appearing on and catch the earliest flight to Japan. They need not be coy about showing up without Japanese visas too – undoubtedly the lonely guys at the Tokyo Electric Power Company would not mind some like-minded company these days. You can all collectively rejoice at the idea that while you were unable to supply nuclear power to all citizens on Earth you have now succeeded in allocating to each one an appropriately deadly dose of user-friendly radiation. And future generations will surely thank you for the ample Becquerels you have now bequeathed them. (I can picture you guys glowing with pride!)

Pro-nukes who still refuse to go to Fukushima after all these compelling arguments I have made above, should consider disappearing into a suitable hole where the rest of us can never find them any more. If we do, then the fission that is bound to happen will release energies before which even a typical nuclear blast will look like a mere firecracker.

Satya Sagar is a writer,  journalist and public health worker based in New Delhi.