Wrong turn at the Barapullah Nallah elevated corridor

Covering a nallah is not bad in itself, but we could have done so much better than this...

I was shooting by Nehru Stadium early one morning in March and was surprised to see a crowd gathered by the side of the road. I asked the auto driver to stop and was told that Agent Vinod was being shot just below. While I didn't get to meet Saif Ali Khan--didn't even get a photo of him--I did get a photo of the Barapullah Nallah corridor and the film set. 

I realized that I used a shot from the same place for my photo essay on Delhi's Nallahs. A lot has changed in the year and a half since the first photo was taken.

I guess you could say it looks nicer--it certainly smells nicer. But a lot of people lost their homes because of this project. What if, instead of a road and a massive parking lot, we'd built a park instead, with a dedicated path for cyclists and pedestrians. There would still be room for some low cost housing to replace what was taken earlier.

Here's the view from the other side of the road. My son saw it one day and asked if it was an airport--so much empty space, it seemed like a runway.

Ripping out a road, or covering a nallah in order to make a public space is not unheard of. I was just down at Dilli Haat the other day and was reminded that it was built on top of a covered nallah. And when I did a web search, I found pictures of one highway in the US that was converted to a park 40 years ago. It happens, though not very often.


A little imagination goes a long way. Besides, if we continue to let cars dictate our urban planning, we will be left with little but tarmac below and hot sun above.

Follow Up: "Climate Scrutiny", the BRAI BILL, the Commons, and Nuclear Subsidies

To follow up Thursday's photo essay on why legally binding climate agreements will probably be required if we are going to get anywhere:

China is backing India's opposition to "scrutiny" of the non-binding pledges made at Copenhagen.  Interestingly, China appears on target to meet it's own emissions targets--it seems they are opposing "scrutiny" on principle, not because they won't make their targets.

It's bizarre to find the US trying to police this, since they've done nothing substantial to address their responsibility for nearly 30% of the carbon floating around in the air right now; they like to blame China without thinking about who buys the lion's share of the products China makes!  Many Americans--including some environmental leaders-- don't even want to mention their historic responsibility, much less do anything about it. I learned this when I visited the Huffington Report recently, where Patrick McCully, director of International Rivers, was saying, "Don't Mention the Climate Debt." There's a longer discussion that needs to be had regarding that, but I'm saving it for another day. To better understand the issues and history surrounding how we share the atmospheric commons, take a look at this short article in current issue of Frontline.

Speaking of the commons, here are a few links to follow up our recent guest post by Sabitha T P:

The Pirate Party is number 4 on this list.

This will make your blood boil: US Corporations to India: Don't Dare Use Free Software!

If water isn't part of the commons, what is?  Find out about what Indian Youth Climate Network is doing for World Water Day.

Regarding the two stupid bills we wrote about on Tuesday, please don't forget to sign these petitions:

Against the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill;

Greenpeace has another petition against the Nuclear Bill; there's no reason not to sign both!

Against the BRAI Bill.

Monsanto admits it's seeds don't work (they actually want to sell us the new and improved variety!)

Interesting slide show on the BRAI Bill (thanks to Kabir for passing it on).

Vandana Shiva on the BRAI Bill

Devinder Sharma on where the repressive parts of the BRAI Bill may have originated.
Comic Relief: The Onion looks at the future of fast food.

NAAM on the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill

Brahma Chellaney writes in Mint about why the Nuclear Damage Bill is so bad (like us, he says "it constitutes a generous Indian state subsidy to foreign firms" and it "weakens nuclear safety").

One more thing to hate about this bill: in most cases, right to claim compensation is capped at 10 years...what?! We're not talking about traffic accidents, my friends--nuclear accidents often cause leaks of radioactive material, which can lead to cancer, and everyone knows that can take years to develop.

Guest Post: Some Uncommon Thoughts on the Commons

By Sabitha T P

The colours of Holi have settled down, unlike the dust in Delhi, being dug up furiously to somehow touch the finish-line before the Commonwealth Games to be held later this year. In some other parts of the country, however, the dust is not about to settle down in a hurry. I am referring to the sale of our hills to mining corporations, particularly in mineral-rich Central and Eastern India - Jharkhand, Orissa and Meghalaya for iron ore, bauxite and uranium mining. These mineral-rich, but cash-poor states answered the neo-liberal Indian state’s call to “open up” the resources with unpremeditated alacrity, and these state governments consider this the path to “development” (like the “development” of Delhi with all the construction activity). Let’s pause here. What are the ‘costs’ of such development? The costs are to be measured in environmental as well as human terms. And more fundamentally, what do we mean when we say the environment? Is it what is out there, somehow at a remove from us, or does it shape our very perceptions of the world and our place in it?

When I was reading about the furious mining activity that is going on as well as the proposed sale of large swathes of forest land in Orissa to international mining corporations (such as the U.K.-based Vedanta mining corporation and the South Korean company POSCO - whose stocks are now largely owned by American shareholders), I started asking the question – how can these state governments do this? How can they sell forests and hills to international corporations for their private profit even when there is large-scale resistance to the dispossession of the indigenous forest-dwellers and to the environmental implications on land and water? How can the state governments conduct these transactions as if they are merely financial, when livelihoods, lives, belief-systems of the tribals, as well as  our access to clean unpolluted water, unpolluted arable land and food security are at stake. These are very large stakes indeed. So then, the next question I asked was, if forests and hills and what is under the earth in these hills can be sold, who does this land belong to?

This brought me to the idea of the commons. These hills and forests are the commons. It belongs, at the same time, to all of us and none of us individually. What does it mean to say “the commons”? It is that which we may collectively own and use without taking anything away, since none of us individually has ownership of the commons. When Roman law divided things into Res Privatae (“private things”) that are individually owned and the owner has the right to possession of, Res Publicae (“public things”) that are state-owned – such as public institutions and public parks, and Res Communes (“things that are common to all”), it meant to create the category of the Commons as distinct from both private and public. Res Communes was comprised of those things that were extra patrimoiium (“incapable of being possessed”) and thus available to and necessary for all. Ergo, neither the individual nor the state has ownership of the commons. The environmental commons are land that is neither owned by an individual nor the state, water, and air. The steady enclosure of the commons by the British between the beginning of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth, saw several protests by farmers, grazers, commoners, and well, poets. For a bit of a rest on this long common road, let us look at the poetry of John Clare, an eighteenth century British poet –

Love hearken the skylarks

Right up in the sky

The suns on the hedges

The bushes are dry

Thy slippers unsullied

May wander abroad

Grass up to the ancles

Is dry as the road

There’s the path if you chuse it

That wanders between

The wheat in the air

And the blossoming bean

Social historian J. M. Neeson reads these lines as a celebration of the commons. John Clare could absorb and take pleasure in the sight of the bushes, the bean and the hedges by the road because he had access to them since so much of the land was shared. John Clare’s nature poetry, she says, “is about this sharing, this access, this possession without ownership.” With the parliamentary enclosure of common lands, the villagers lost not just access to the land, but a way of perceiving the world and a way of life. John Clare writes in another poem, ‘The Mores’:

These paths are stopt – the rude philistines thrall

Is laid upon them and destroyed them all

Each little tyrant with his little sign

Shows where man claims where earth glows no more divine

But paths to freedom and to childhood dear

A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’

And on the tree with ivy overhung

The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung

As tho the very birds should learn to know

When they go there they must no further go

These poems could very well be about the forcible taking away of any commons. Such alienation changes a very real way of life and smothers freedoms.

The commons are our collective heritage, nurturing and in turn, to be nurtured. However, instead of democratic and sustainable management of this common heritage, what we see in the sale of our hills and forests is not only the mutilation of the land (causing water contamination as well as a drastic fall in water table levels in the villages around the hills, thus affecting water security and farm yield), and the dispossession of the tribals for whom this land is their natural and cultural habitat; what we see in this sale of the commons for private profit is the very erosion of the idea of the Commons and a perversion of the principle of Greater Common Good. It is not only a political question of the original inhabitants’ right to land – which is more than land for them, it is their way of life, their gods – but also a question of the degradation of our environmental commons. Did we give our consent to the sale of the commons that belongs to all of us, sustaining us? Is it possible for the state to abdicate its role as a representative house and a protector of our inalienable rights, and instead turn predator on its citizens and their commons?

Did you know (I didn’t!) that last year’s Nobel Prize for Economics was shared by Elinor Ostrom who has been championing the cause of the commons?  Over decades Ostrom has studied and documented how different communities manage common resources – forests, grazing lands, water for irrigation, fishing – sustainably and equitably over long periods of time. Her award was seen by the Commons Movement as a debunking of the popular notion that private property has effectively prevented resources from being depleted or misused. It is indeed significant that the world’s most prestigious Economics prize was awarded to a champion of equitable and sustainable communal sharing of resources. Over the last few years commons movements have been gathering momentum, movements that argue and work for the protection of what we share together – from natural resources to public parks, to biodiversity and the internet. You can read about some of them (including the Pirate Party in Sweden – don’t we all want to support it!) here.

The tribals are communities who live by the principle of the commons - the only sustainable model of human inhabitation on earth - leaving the commons as they found it without taking anything away, leaving it intact for the future generations of passers-by. Their subsistence-level cultivation, collection of honey, and fishing can be considered largely unharmful, minimal intervention that is also at the same time protective of the commons. If the commons belong to you and me, we have the responsibility to safeguard it sustainably. Sustainable development can only be possible when it is founded on the principle of the commons. And we have much to learn from the shared ways of life and belief-systems of the indigenous forest dwellers. We owe not only the survival of the forests to their environmentally respectful ways of life, but also the hope of learning sustainability and an inherent respect for our environment from them, so that we too, like them, may leave unnoticeable footprints on the commons we are passing through and are passing on to our children and grandchildren.

Sabitha T P teaches English literature to undergraduate students in Delhi University.  Her poetry has appeared in many places, in both English and Malayalam.