Web being carved up into info plantations

Nicholas Carr

It seems to be following the pattern that has always characterised popular media.

SEARCH AT Google.com on evolution or Iraq or AIDS, and the same site will appear at the top of the list of results: Wikipedia. Alter your search into one for John Keats or Muhammad Ali or Christianity or platypus or loneliness, and the same thing will happen. Pacific Ocean? Wikipedia. Catherine de Medici? Wikipedia. Human brain? Wikipedia.

In fact, if you Google any person, place or thing today, you're almost guaranteed to find Wikipedia at or near the top of the list of recommended pages. Despite its flaws, the amateur-written encyclopaedia has become the world's all-purpose information source. It's our new Delphic oracle.

The hegemony of Wikipedia is only the most striking manifestation of a broad and unexpected phenomenon: The world wide web is shrinking. I don't mean there are fewer sites than there used to be. On that measure, the web is bigger than ever. I mean that more and more of our time online is being spent at an ever-smaller number of megasites. The wilds of the Internet are being carved up among a handful of vast information plantations.

Web statistics tell the tale. The blogger Richard MacManus recently examined trends in online traffic over the past five years. He found that between the end of 2001 and the end of last year, the number of Internet domains expanded by more than 75 per cent, from 2.9 million to 5.1 million. At the same time, however, the dominance of the most popular domains grew substantially. At the end of 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 per cent of all the pages viewed on the Net. By the end of last year, the top 10 accounted for fully 40 per cent of page views.

Much of the increase in traffic consolidation can, as Mr. MacManus points out, be attributed to the growth of social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. In 2001, MySpace didn't even exist. Now, it is the most visited on the Net, accounting for a whopping 16 per cent of all page views.

The concentration is happening in other areas as well. Take search engines. According to Hitwise, Google now handles 65 per cent of all web searches, up from 58 per cent just a year ago. Despite aggressive attempts by Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Ask to boost their own shares of the search market, Google continues to widen its lead.

If Google is an example of the shrinking of the Net, it's also one of the causes. Because the search engine determines a site's relevance based on its popularity, as measured by, among other things, the number of other sites that link to it, it has had the effect of turning the web into a giant feedback loop. The more popular a site becomes, the more it comes to dominate search results, which ends up funnelling ever more links and traffic to it.

On the Internet, the big get bigger. It wasn't supposed to be like that. When the web arrived in the early 1990s, it was heralded as a liberating force that would free us from the confines of gated communities like AOL and Compuserve. The Internet was supposed to be an open, democratic medium, an information bazaar putting individuals on the same footing as big companies.

In the end, though, the Internet seems to be following the same pattern that has always characterised popular media. A few huge outlets come to dominate readership and viewership and smaller, more specialised ones are consigned to the periphery. Most of the largest sites are now in the midst of acquisition sprees or expansion programmes intended to extend their dominion. Just last week, MySpace announced it would buy Photobucket, the largest photo-sharing site; Facebook said it would expand into the classified advertising business; and Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said that his company has been acquiring small companies at the rate of one a week to build out its portfolio.

It may be that Internet users will revolt against the dominance of the mega-sites. But I wouldn't bet on it. All the signs point to a continuing concentration of traffic within the fences of the new information plantations. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

(Nicholas Carr's next book is called The Big Switch. He blogs at roughtype.com)

Ongoing dangers of cluster bomblets

Richard Norton-Taylor

Of the 440 million devices dropped since 1965, about 22 million-132 million remain unexploded in 20 countries.

MILLIONS OF people will be endangered by up to 132 million cluster bomblets that have not yet exploded, causing lasting economic and social harm to communities in more than 20 countries for decades to come, a leading charity warned on Wednesday.

Handicap International studied data from nine countries most heavily affected by the weapon and found that about 440 million cluster bomblets had been dropped there since 1965. Based on failure rates of 5-30 per cent, the group estimated that 22 million-132 million of the devices remain unexploded.

The vast majority of cluster bomb casualties occur while victims are carrying on their daily lives, says the report, "Circle of Impact: The Fatal Footprint of Cluster Munitions on People and Communities."

The huge numbers turn "homes and crucial social areas of the people living in affected countries into de facto minefields," says the Brussels-based charity. "As men and boys are the traditional earners and the majority of casualties, the economic loss for both the short term and the distant future cannot be underestimated."

In Afghanistan, boys between five and 14 who are tending animals are most likely to be casualties. In Laos, more than 1,000 people were killed by submunitions while weeding or sowing crops. In many cases people knowingly enter contaminated areas out of economic necessity, the report says.

In southern Lebanon, cluster munitions contaminate approximately 90 per cent of the land used for farming. The contamination of essential land is reflected in the rise of cluster bomb casualties from two a year prior to 2006 to two a day in the months following last summer's conflict with Israel.

In Iraq, the repeated use of cluster bombs has left a devastating legacy that continues to severely restrict the lives of its people, the charity reports.

More than 4,000 civilians have been killed or injured by failed cluster munitions since the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Some 60 per cent of the casualties have been children.

Next week governments will meet in the Peruvian capital of Lima to discuss a draft treaty to ban the bombs.

Rae McGrath, of the Handicap International network, said: "It is an offence against all humanitarian norms to continue using these weapons with such evidence of their impact available." —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Encounters with uncontacted Amazon tribes

David Hill

Peru's uncontacted Indians are increasingly in danger as oil companies, encouraged by the government, move in.

ONE MINUTE I had been fast asleep, then came the yapping of the dogs, rising to a frenzy. What I didn't know then was what had set them off: people from one of world's last uncontacted Indian tribes had just entered the village on Peru's Curanja river, where I was staying.

On that occasion, before dawn in one of the most remote parts of the Peruvian Amazon, the Indians left as mysteriously as they came. But, later that day, they returned, and on our arrival from a hunting trip further up river, one of the villagers, Hipa, was shouting excitedly. "He's saying one of his wives just saw some uncontacted Indians in the village," said Octavio, one of my three Cashinahua Indian guides.

"How many?"

"Three. They were armed with bows and arrows."

"Where were they?"

"At the far end of the village, picking bananas from one of the gardens."

"And what happened?"

"Hipa called out to them and they ran off immediately."

We spent that night barricaded in our huts and, next morning, speculated about what had happened. According to Hipa, they were from one of three uncontacted tribes living deep in that part of the jungle, possibly moving backwards and forwards across the border with Brazil. This wasn't the first time he had seen them, but their presence in that part of the jungle was unusual. Their distinctive hairstyle, shaven around the temples but longer at the back, suggested that they, like Hipa himself, spoke a language related to Cashinahua.

Sent to the Peruvian Amazon by Survival International, my aim was to gather as much information as possible about the uncontacted tribes living there: whereabouts, numbers, names, ways of life, and, most important, the threats that risk sending them to extinction. The tribes Hipa spoke of are just three of an estimated 15 uncontacted tribes in Peru, all of them living in the jungle in the most remote, inaccessible regions. At least two of these tribes live in the northern Peruvian Amazon, near the frontier with Ecuador, but the majority are in Peru's south-east. Although some may never have had contact with outsiders at all, it is believed that many are the descendants of tribes contacted more than 100 years ago during the "rubber boom" and who fled the atrocities committed against them by rubber magnates and their employees: enslavement, massacres, and decimation by new diseases.

"First just one came out, then two, then three, four, five, six, seven, but there were more than that in total," says a Yine Indian man called Jose on the Las Piedras river, where members of an uncontacted tribe known as the Mashco-Piro have been seen on numerous occasions in recent years.

The nature of these encounters has varied — from brief sightings to exchanges of conversation or even gifts such as meat and metal goods.

"We had a dozen machetes, a dozen knives and some axes and pots with us," Jose says. "We gave these to them. Not by hand, but by leaving them on the beach. We said to them: `Come closer.' But they didn't want to. They said to us: `Go further back, further back.' So we did. We went further downstream and, after that, they crossed the river, picked up the goods we left for them, and they started cheering. They were all very happy."

Although the Mashco-Piro are the largest of all the uncontacted tribes, numbering an estimated 600 people, they are under threat from illegal loggers invading their territory to cut down mahogany trees. Mahogany is one of the world's most valuable hardwoods, and south-east Peru is home to some of the last commercially viable stands. More than 80 per cent of the timber is exported to the United States. The loggers' presence there brings them into contact with the uncontacted tribes, often leading to violence, and sometimes deaths.

"The loggers want to kill the Mashco-Piro," says one Yine man, who asked not to be named. "And they have done, although the police come here and say it's the uncontacted Indians who kill the loggers. But that's not the case."

The other major threat is oil. Earlier this year the Peruvian government opened up 70 per cent of its jungle to oil companies for exploration, and the vast majority of areas inhabited by uncontacted Indians now face an invasion of oil workers.

Currently, the most critical area is near the border with Ecuador, where American oil company Barrett Resources has discovered huge oil deposits. Now awaiting the green light from Peru's Ministry of Mines and Energy, the production phase of the project will involve further seismic testing and the construction of platforms, wells, roads, pipelines and a processing facility.

But Barrett's find is in the middle of at least two uncontacted tribes' territories. The company recognises this, declaring in its environmental impact assessment that "during seismic activities in lot 67, workers will probably meet these uncontacted peoples..."

Government's role

What makes the tribes' situation more vulnerable is that the Peruvian Government almost totally disregards its uncontacted peoples. The chairman of Perupetro, the government body charged with granting oil exploration licences to companies, recently questioned the existence of any uncontacted tribes. "It's absurd to say there are uncontacted peoples when no one has seen them," said Perupetro's chairman, Daniel Saba, speaking on Peruvian television. "This is a tragic little game that we don't want to play."

Mr. Saba was apparently unaware that not only oil companies such as Barrett but even his own government have repeatedly confirmed the existence of these tribes in northern and south-east Peru, to say nothing of the huge amount of evidence collected by Survival International and many other organisations.

"Doubtless, Mr. Saba would much rather there were no uncontacted Indians in the areas where he wants to explore for oil,'' says Survival's director, Stephen Corry. "Declaring they don't exist at all, however, is a shameful self-fulfilling prophecy. If Perupetro allows companies to go in, it's likely to destroy the Indians completely — and then they really won't exist." —

(David Hill is a researcher and campaigner at Survival International. More information about uncontacted tribes, and how to get involved with Survival's campaign, at survival-international.org)

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

CO2 sponge losing ability to soak up extra emissions

James Randerson

Climate change "feedback effect" in the Southern Ocean.

ONE OF the most important of the natural sponges that soak up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is working 30 per cent less efficiently than a quarter of a century ago, researchers say.

The Southern Ocean is responsible for soaking up the annual CO2 contribution of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands combined, but the study shows that the ocean is absorbing the same quantity of the gas as it was 24 years ago. Scientists had expected that the amount of CO2 absorbed would increase in line with rising levels in the atmosphere. The change is due to increased winds over the ocean linked to climate change and the depleted ozone layer.

"This is serious. All climate models predict that this kind of `feedback' will continue and intensify during this century," said Corinne Le Quere, part of the team at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, which carried out the study. "This is the first time that we've been able to say that climate change itself is responsible for the saturation of the Southern Ocean sink."

So-called carbon sinks such as the oceans, vegetation, and soils soak up around half of the extra CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere each year — some 9.3 billion tonnes. The Southern Ocean alone is responsible for parcelling up 0.7 billion tonnes a year and storing it in the deep.

"Since the 1980s the Southern Ocean sink for carbon has not changed at all, although CO2 emissions over the same period have increased by 40 per cent," said Professor Le Quere. "We would expect that as the emissions and the CO2 in the atmosphere have increased, the Southern Ocean sink should also increase."

The team looked at measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere from 40 stations around the globe — 11 around the Southern Ocean itself. They calculate that the efficiency of the Southern Ocean as a carbon sink has dropped by 30 per cent compared with the amount it would be putting away if it had kept pace with levels of CO2.

The team used CO2 measurements in water collected during research cruises in the Southern Ocean in 1998, 2000, 2001, and 2002 to check their calculations.

The scientists believe the reason for the change is an increase in average wind speed across the ocean.

"The winds act to mix the oceans. So when you have strong winds you have more water circulation and more mixing," said Professor Le Quere. More mixing brings colder water up from the depths that is saturated with CO2, so that it cannot accept any more from the atmosphere. The increase in wind speed is partly a consequence of climate change itself — one of a handful of "positive feedback" effects that look likely to accelerate global warming. Because the world is warming unevenly, pressure differences between different regions are increasing. One consequence of this is increasing wind speed in the Southern Ocean. The depletion of the ozone layer has also contributed to higher winds.

"Since the beginning of the industrial revolution the world's oceans have absorbed about a quarter of the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere by humans. The possibility that in a warmer world the Southern Ocean — the strongest ocean sink — is weakening is a cause for concern," said Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Time's Up

The action President Bush promised on Darfur last month is overdue.

Washington Post, May 20

ONE MONTH ago President Bush said that he was giving the Sudanese government a "last chance" to comply with United Nations orders to end what Mr. Bush again called "genocide" in Darfur. Strongman Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the president said, would have "a short period of time" to agree to the full deployment of an international peacekeeping force, end support for militias that have been slaughtering civilians, and allow aid into the region. "If President Bashir does not meet his obligations," Mr. Bush said in a speech delivered at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, "the United States will act."

The day after Mr. Bush spoke, Mr. Bashir's government launched a new campaign of bombing raids in northern Darfur. Helicopter gunships and Antonov aircraft attacked villages for the next 10 days, according to the United Nations. In the village of Um Rai, the United Nations said, rockets fired by a government helicopter blasted a school. The government painted some of its planes white so that they would be mistaken for U.N. aircraft operating in the region.

Violence is escalating elsewhere in Darfur, driven not only by the government's war with separatist rebels but by an insurgency in neighboring Chad, rebel splinter groups and local grievances. The United Nations has counted another 250,000 displaced persons during the past six months, adding to the more than 2 million refugees, many of them crammed into undersupplied and insecure camps. Meanwhile, the African Union's peacekeeping force is on the verge of breaking down. Rwanda is among several governments threatening to withdraw troops because of the failure of Western governments to provide funding and equipment.

The U.N. plan to turn the African Union force into a joint mission with more than 20,000 troops, finalized last fall, is stalled. Pressured by his former allies in the Arab League and China, Mr. Bashir grudgingly agreed last month to accept 3,000 U.N. troops. But the half-baked compromise for deploying them is so unwieldy -- the U.N. forces will have to operate in Darfur under African Union command -- that few countries have been willing to pledge soldiers. Even if successfully deployed the shrunken force would be far too small to protect civilians.

All this should make it obvious that "the short period of time" that Mr. Bush allowed has run out. The president reluctantly agreed to the delay because U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon pleaded for more time to negotiate with Mr. Bashir. But Mr. Ban's own spokesperson called the renewed bombing "indiscriminate" and a violation of international law. In his April 18 speech Mr. Bush mentioned one clear remedy for such attacks: steps "by the international community" to "deny Sudan's government the ability to fly its military aircraft over Darfur." There is support for that idea in the British government; now is the time for Mr. Bush to actively explore it while implementing the unilateral U.S. financial sanctions he outlined. With the United States holding the chair of the U.N. Security Council, now is also the time to introduce the sanctions resolution that Britain and the United States have been discussing. Mr. Bashir has had his "last chance" -- in fact, he has had far too many of them.

Sudanese Police Attack On Aid Workers Tests U.N. Chief's Diplomacy - He Calls It 'Unacceptable' in Letter to Bashir

Colum Lynch
Washington Post, May 20

UNITED NATIONS -- On Jan. 19, a group of 20 international aid workers and peacekeepers celebrated their day off with an afternoon of dining, drinking and dancing at the guesthouse of the private relief agency, the American Refugee Committee, in the town of Nyala, Darfur.

The outing ended in the early evening when Sudanese police and security agents broke into the house, videotaped the attendees -- which included five U.N. workers, representatives of six U.S. and British aid agencies, and African Union peacekeepers -- and then beat them with batons and rifle butts and sexually assaulted at least one female U.N. worker. Locals cheered from the street, and some joined in the assault.

The diners were jailed, subjected to further beatings and accused of illegally consuming alcohol and engaging in immoral behavior, citing the discovery of a Sudanese woman found alone in a room with a man. Those charges were reduced or dropped, but the hosts and a handful of other aid workers were each fined about $100 and charged with failing to obtain a permit to hold a gathering.

The episode -- drawn from interviews and confidential written accounts from U.N. officials and aid workers -- has become a test of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon's efforts to use quiet diplomacy with Sudan. Ban, who has never spoken publicly about the case, called the attack "unacceptable" in a private letter to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and urged him to ensure that police were held accountable. But Ban's attempt to parlay his new relationship with Bashir -- cultivated during a series of talks over U.N.-brokered peacekeeping -- has yielded little progress in this case.

Bashir last month dismissed Ban's appeal, warning in a confidential letter that U.N. staff members would be held accountable for violating Sudanese laws and suggesting that they receive special training in "conduct and discipline" to ensure they obey those laws. "Accordingly, persons working in Sudan, regardless of their status or assignments, are expected to observe and respect the customary laws of the communities in which they serve."

Bashir and other Sudanese officials have said the episode underscores how foreign aid workers trample on Sudan's Islamic traditions, and Sudanese religious leaders have organized demonstrations to protest the outsiders' behavior.

For the United Nations, the incident marked the most flagrant act of violence by government forces against international personnel in Darfur. A U.N. board of inquiry into the incident -- which involved relief workers from Oxfam International, World Vision International and the International Rescue Committee -- recently concluded that Sudan violated provisions of the status of forces agreement governing the U.N. presence in Sudan.

"The humanitarian community feels, rightly, doubly victimized in this incident. Those concerned were not only assaulted, but then themselves charged with a crime," John Holmes, the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, told the U.N. Security Council last month. "Those who have come to help the population are now themselves targets."

The conflict in Darfur began in February 2003, when Darfurian rebels took up arms against the Islamic government, claiming that they represented the region's disadvantaged black villagers. In response, Khartoum armed and organized Arab militia, known as the Janjaweed, and supported a bloody counterinsurgency that led to the destruction of hundreds of villages, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the flight of more than 2.5 million from their homes.

Conditions improved in 2004 after relief workers flooded into Darfur, establishing a massive aid operation that currently costs $800 million a year. Today, more than 13,000 relief workers, including nearly 900 foreigners, deliver food, medicine and other life-saving services to more than 3 million people.

But security has deteriorated sharply since May 2006, when Khartoum and one of Darfur's chief rebel factions, the Sudan Liberation Army, signed the Darfur Peace Accord -- a pact that was rejected by several rebel factions and most of Darfur's population, and which led to the splintering of Darfurian rebel groups.

The Nyala incident occurred at a time when attacks against foreigner aid workers are soaring in Darfur. Relief workers have suffered nearly daily attacks, including carjackings and assaults that have left more than 13 dead over the past year and made huge swaths of Darfur off limits for aid workers. Last month, armed groups hijacked 16 humanitarian vehicles, attacked eight humanitarian compounds, ambushed and looted seven relief convoys, and shot four aid workers.

The British relief agency Oxfam International, France's Action Against Hunger and the U.N. World Food Program withdrew in December from Darfur's largest camp for displaced persons, in Gereida, after armed groups attacked six humanitarian compounds on Dec. 18, stealing vehicles, cash and communications equipment, subjecting aid workers to beatings and mock executions, and raping one woman. The International Committee of the Red Cross is the only international aid organization remaining in the camp, where 130,000 people are settled.

"It is getting to the point now where the humanitarian aid response is at risk of breaking down," said Alun McDonald, a Khartoum-based spokesman for the British aid agency Oxfam International. "We used to know who to do deal with; we used to know who to phone up we were coming through their areas. Now we don't know."

Some aid workers have expressed concern that the U.N. leadership has not confronted the Sudanese government more forcefully. Ban's predecessor, Kofi Annan, made little fuss about Sudan's expulsion in December of former U.N. Special Representative Jan Pronk. A replacement has not been named.

The United Nations has not acknowledged Sudan's expulsion of the three other U.N. officials over the past six months, including the top-ranking security official who was given 48 hours to leave the country after Sudanese officials protested his circulation of a memo warning aid workers of possible al-Qaeda attacks.

U.N. officials say that while Ban has not gone public, he has been uncommonly tough with Bashir in private. In his confidential Feb. 23 letter to Bashir, Ban expressed "deep concern" over the January attack. "I view this incident as serious and unacceptable and I trust that your government will ensure that the perpetrators are held accountable."

Ban urged Bashir to pledge "his own personal support" to ensure cooperation with a U.N. board of inquiry looking into the incident. He also pressed Bashir to order a judicial review of the case in Khartoum to "send the message that your government will not tolerate attacks against relief workers by its own officials or anyone else."

In his reply, Bashir made no mention of the police abuses and told Ban to drop the matter. "I suggest that episodes of similar nature be tackled at the appropriate administrative level so that you and I devote our time and energies to reinvigorate the peace process."

Tribal travail - New Economic Policy And The Matrix Of Poverty

Arun Kumar Ghosh
The Statesman. 18 May

The greatest challenge that the government has faced since independence is to ensure social justice for the Scheduled Tribes. Along with the Scheduled Castes and other de-notified tribes, they constitute the weakest sections of the population, indeed the matrix of India’s poverty. Historically, they have been subjected to the worst form of exploitation. However, the basis of tribal isolation and exclusion is neither caste nor religion but ethnicity. Tribals have been ethnically different from the mainstream Indian society with a distinct culture, language, social organisation, and economy.

The government has been pursuing policies of protective discrimination for the uplift of the ST ever since independence. Reservation in educational institutions and services, introduction of such schemes as the Integrated Tribal Development Projects (ITDPs), the tribal sub-plan under the Modified Area Development Approach (MADA), and the Special Central Assistance for Tribes. But the results have not been satisfactory.

Characteristics

Tribals are predominant in the north-central sub-region that covers Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, the north-western parts of Bengal and North Orissa. The characteristics are at once geo-climatic and demographic. As per the 2001 census, the total population in this sub-region is 49.1 million of whom 11.4 million are tribes constituting about 23 per cent of the tribal population. The major tribal communities are Santhal, Oraon, Munda, Ho, Mahali, Bhumij, Sabar, Khond, Gond and Kawar. Some of the primitive tribes living in this sub-region are the Birhor, Lodha, Mal Paharia, Hill Kharia, Juang Pauri Bhuiya.

The right to life has been enshrined in the Constitution as a fundamental right. And yet the development process, which was initiated more than 55 years ago, has not ensured a livelihood to a considerable section of the society. Though poverty has declined substantially during this period, more than a quarter of the population still lives below the poverty line. Poverty is more grinding among the marginalised sections of the society, especially among the STs. A significant segment of the tribal population is unable to earn a minimum income to meet the basic requirements. The traditional occupations are hunting, food-gathering and shifting cultivation.

The tribals have been the worst sufferers in the wake of the enactment of laws against cultivation in forest areas. To cope with the exploitation of moneylenders they have to sell their assets. The Employment and Unemployment Survey 1999-2000 brought out by NSSO shows that more than 46 per cent of the tribes were either landless or had land up to one acre. During the same period more than 55 per cent of the tribes in the rural areas were unemployed, whereas it was about 48 per cent in the urban areas. The development process in recent years has led to jobless growth.

The general health problems of the tribal communities in this sub-region resemble those of the rural and other underprivileged sections, notably malnutrition, anaemia, parasitic infections, diarrhoea and respiratory infection. Tribals also suffer from deficiency of calcium, vitamin A, and riboflavin and animal protein. The poor nutritional status of tribal women directly influences their reproductive ability and their survival, growth and development.

According to the National Family Health survey, the average Body Mass Index (BMIs) of married tribal women is substantially lower than that of the country’s general female population. Under-nutrition and anaemia among tribal children is considerably higher. In the absence of early diagnosis and treatment, these diseases may lead to infant and child mortality. In fact a large number of deaths have occurred due to acute respiratory infection and diarrhoea.

In view of the privatisation of health services and consequent increase in the price of drugs, one has to think of an alternative system of medicine which would be locally available and cost-effective. Tribals have over the decades developed their own medicine system based on herbs and other items collected from nature and processed locally. They have their own system of diagnosis and cure. However, the wisdom of replacing the traditional health care system with the modern has been questioned by a number of scholars.

Though the National Health Policy, 1983, emphasised the need for priority attention in terms of primary health coverage, it is reported that health services in tribal areas are not adequate in terms of availability of medicine, medical personnel and equipment. The National Health Policy, 2002, didn’t make any separate policy statement for tribals. The gradual withdrawal of the state from the health sector and subsequent globalisation is a matter of concern because it will affect the marginalised groups like STs and other economically weaker sections.

Despite constitutional protection, the process of alienation of tribal land has not been stopped. In most of the cases, the rights over the land and nearby forest accrued to the tribals because they cleared the forest land and made it habitable. They lived there for generations and developed a community-based pattern of ownership. The tribal areas, particularly in the sub-central region are rich in natural resources and have attracted considerable investment in mines, industries, hydel-power and irrigation projects. This has led to both direct and indirect eviction.

Planned development immediately after independence, specially the growth of core sectors, displaced a large number of persons. Conservative estimates put this figure to be between 30 and 50 million. Only about 25 per cent of such displaced persons have been properly resettled. Others became victims of the development process, and the majority of them are STs.

Resettlement

The tragedy is that despite this prior knowledge of the extent of displacement, those in charge of development projects, mostly non-tribals, pay little attention to the processes of resettlement and rehabilitation. Instead, development projects focus on economic efficiency and not on those who stand to lose all that they have ~ their land, means of livelihood and stable patterns of social and cultural life. Those tribals who are displaced by the development projects need to be recognised as stakeholders in the projects. They need to be a part of the development process.

In the era of the new economic policy, liberalisation and globalisation, the entry of the private sector in the arena of development has increased the demand for land. This simply means more displacement, dislocation of lifestyles and loss of livelihood. It has been taken for granted that large-scale displacement will occur as an integral part of liberalisation. And the tribals will suffer. The development process must ensure that there are no losers. The gains should be equitably distributed among all the stakeholders. Only then can the tribals really benefit from the process.

The author is Associate Fellow, Council for Social Development, New Delhi

Can Cities Save the Earth?

NYT, May 19, 2007
Editorial

The mayors of some of the world’s biggest cities have every reason to feel especially anxious about climate change. Their populations are the biggest polluters but also among the most vulnerable to weather-related catastrophes. And they are far ahead of their national governments in giving urgency to global warming. So, for the second time since 2005, the leaders of dozens of cities, representing 400 million people, have stepped up. Meeting in New York this week, they produced a plan that should shame G-8 leaders into at least saying something about the issue at their meeting next month.

Most significantly, 15 cities, including New York, Chicago, Karachi, Toronto and Tokyo, signed on to a $5 billion program to make older buildings more energy efficient. Energy-gluttonous cities account for three-fourths of greenhouse gas emissions the world over, and buildings are responsible for 40 percent of emissions and much more in older cities. The project could reduce global carbon emissions by 10 percent.

It may be that the mayors, aware their powers end at the city limits, are more willing than holders of higher offices to take to innovation. When Mayor Clover Moore of Sydney asks residents to turn off lights for an hour, the city goes dark. Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago is distributing rooftop rain barrels, and already pipes 55 million gallons of rainwater into Lake Michigan every year. Toronto discounts electricity for citizens who conserve.

Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London and organizer of the group, bucked public opinion when he imposed a hefty fee (now about $16) to drive on London’s busiest streets. The result was increased productivity for businesses, enhanced public transportation — paid for with fee revenues — and streets that flow so freely, buses sometimes pull over lest they run too far ahead of schedule. The congestion fee proposed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York — $8 for most cars in much of Manhattan — deserves swift approval from state lawmakers.

Sadly, the mayors’ project on energy-efficient buildings would represent the single most significant government response to date on climate change. If it were enough, we would thank the mayors and ride our bicycles into the sunset, but, of course, it isn’t. The job of containing climate-changing human actions — from individual to industrial — cannot occur in a vacuum. The heavy lifting still must be done by the governments of the industrial powers and their emerging counterparts in India, China and Brazil.

Wolfowitz Resigns, Ending Long Fight at World Bank

NYT, May 18, 2007
STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, May 17 — Paul D. Wolfowitz, ending a furor over favoritism that blew up into a global fight over American leadership, announced his resignation as president of the World Bank Thursday evening after the bank’s board accepted his claim that his mistakes at the bank were made in good faith.

The decision came four days after a special investigative committee of the bank concluded that he had violated his contract by breaking ethical and governing rules in arranging the generous pay and promotion package for Shaha Ali Riza, his companion, in 2005.

The resignation, effective June 30, brought a dramatic conclusion to two days of negotiations between Mr. Wolfowitz and the bank board after weeks of turmoil.

“He assured us that he acted ethically and in good faith in what he believed were the best interests of the institution, and we accept that,” said the board’s directors in a statement issued Thursday night. “We also accept that others involved acted ethically and in good faith.”

In the carefully negotiated statement, the bank board praised Mr. Wolfowitz for his two years of service, particularly for his work in arranging debt relief and pressing for more assistance to poor countries, especially in Africa. They also cited Mr. Wolfowitz’s work in combating corruption, his signature issue.

Mr. Wolfowitz said he was grateful for the directors’ decision and, referring to the bank’s mission of helping the world’s poor, added: “Now it is necessary to find a way to move forward. To do that I have concluded that it is in the best interests of those whom this institution serves for that mission to be carried forward under new leadership.”

Mr. Wolfowitz’s negotiated departure averted what threatened to become a bitter rupture between the United States and its economic partners at an institution established after World War II. The World Bank channels $22 billion in loans and grants a year to poor countries.

But he left behind a place that must heal its divisions and overhaul a flawed, cumbersome structure that had allowed the controversy over Mr. Wolfowitz to spread out of control.

People close to the negotiations said that Mr. Wolfowitz had agreed not to make major personnel or policy decisions between now and June 30. Some bank officials said he might go on an administrative leave and cede day-to-day functions to an acting leader, but that might not be decided until Friday.

President Bush earlier in the day praised Mr. Wolfowitz at a news conference but signaled that the end was near by saying he regretted “that it’s come to this.” A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said, “We would have preferred that he stay at the bank, but the president reluctantly accepts his decision.”

More important for the bank’s future, Mr. Fratto said, President Bush will soon announce a candidate to succeed Mr. Wolfowitz, quashing speculation that the United States would end the custom, in effect since the 1940s, of the American president picking the bank president.

Many European officials previously indicated that they would go along with the United States’ picking a successor if Mr. Wolfowitz would resign voluntarily, as he now has.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said Thursday that he would “consult my colleagues around the world” before recommending a choice to Mr. Bush, in what seemed to be an effort to assure allies that the United States would not repeat what happened in 2005 when Mr. Bush surprised them by selecting Mr. Wolfowitz, then a deputy secretary of defense and an architect of the Iraq war.

Leaders of Germany and France objected but decided not to make a fight over the choice and risk reopening wounds from their opposition to the war two years earlier. Some also argued that Mr. Wolfowitz, as a conservative seeking to write a new chapter in a career that had been focused on national security, might bring new support to aiding the world’s poor.

Soon after Mr. Wolfowitz took office, however, he engaged in fights in various quarters at the bank over issues including his campaign against corruption, in which he suspended aid to several countries without consulting board members, and his reliance on a small group of aides.

Mr. Wolfowitz’s resignation, while ending the turmoil that erupted in early April over the disclosure of his role in arranging Ms. Riza’s pay and promotion package, will not by itself repair the divisions at the bank over his leadership, bank officials said Thursday evening.

By all accounts, the terms of Mr. Wolfowitz’s exoneration left a bitter taste with most of the 24 board members, who represent major donor countries, as well as clusters of smaller donor and recipient countries. Most had wanted to adopt the findings of the special board committee that determined he had acted unethically on the matter of Ms. Riza.

But the closest the board came to criticizing Mr. Wolfowitz was saying in that “a number of mistakes were made by a number of individuals in handling the matter under consideration and that the bank’s systems did not prove robust to the strain under which they were placed.”

Also angered was the bank’s staff association, which had called for Mr. Wolfowitz’s resignation in early April. The bank’s internal blogs were filled with denunciations of the action on Thursday evening.

Late in the evening, the association issued a statement saying, “Welcome though it is, the president’s resignation is not acceptable under the present arrangement,” and that it “completely undermines the principles of good governance and the principles that the staff fight to uphold.”

The association represents most of the 7,000 full-time employees at the bank in Washington. Their unhappiness could be a crucial factor in the bank board’s ability to heal the wounds left by the fight over Mr. Wolfowitz. It appeared likely that after Mr. Wolfowitz’s departure there would be a departure of several top aides, including Robin Cleveland, who officials said was involved in the negotiations over the statements accompanying his departure.

During the day, as word spread throughout the institution that Mr. Wolfowitz was close to a deal, some officials said that one of the obstacles was his compensation package. But there was no information Thursday night on whether he would receive any sort of severance package or pension, or be reimbursed for legal fees from his long battle.

Mr. Wolfowitz’s pay package was $302,470 in salary as of 2004 — the bank pays any of the taxes on that sum — and $141,290 in expenses. His contract calls for him to be paid a year’s salary if he is terminated, but it was unclear whether his resignation would be considered a termination as defined by the contract.

Mr. Wolfowitz’s fight for vindication was led by his lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, and negotiated at the bank by the British director, Thomas Scholar, a close associate of Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer who is to become prime minister this summer.

Learn more about Wolfowitz

NYT, March 17, 2005

Man in the News - The World Is His Stage: Paul Dundes Wolfowitz

ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, March 16 - After surveying the tsunami-pummeled coast of Indonesia from a Navy helicopter in January, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz appeared shaken at the devastation.

"When you fly over in a helicopter you just begin to get a sense of how enormous this tragedy has been, and when people don't just lose a parent or a brother, but they lose their entire family, it gives a new horrible meaning to what it means to be a survivor," he told reporters in Banda Aceh.

"It's also clear," Mr. Wolfowitz added, "that beyond the immediate needs, there are going to be a great deal of work to rebuild, reconstruct."

In that three-day trip to South Asia to assess tsunami damage and the Pentagon's role in relief efforts, his friends and associates say, the seeds for President Bush's selection of Mr. Wolfowitz to be the next president of the World Bank were planted. Freed, however briefly, from his Pentagon office, the daily drumbeat of violence and American casualty reports from Iraq, and a war of which he was a principal architect, friends say, Mr. Wolfowitz was energized both to be back in Asia - he was the United States ambassador to Indonesia in the late 1980's - and to be seen as the harbinger of help, not conflict.

"It did have a huge impact on him," said Sean O'Keefe, an old friend and former NASA administrator who is now chancellor at Louisiana State University. "He was stunned by the human consequences there."

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Wolfowitz said the World Bank, which sets development policy for much of the third world, was a logical extension of his longtime goal to spread human rights and political freedoms around the globe. "Economic development supports political development, and it really came home to me with the Asian tsunami," he said.

Caricatured as a hawk among hawks in the Bush administration and a lightning rod for its Iraq policy, Mr. Wolfowitz is tougher to pigeonhole under closer examination. As a teenager, he attended the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, and in 2003 he said he remained a civil libertarian and a "bleeding heart" on social issues. His soft-spoken personal style belies any fire-breathing image. And his activist vision has defined his career inside and outside government. Besides calling for the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein years before American troops invaded Iraq in 2003, Mr. Wolfowitz advocated arming the Bosnian Muslims in their war against the Serbs and criticized the Clinton administration over its Kosovo policy, contending it waited too long to intervene militarily.

His humanitarian impulses have taken him to desolate places. In July 2003, Mr. Wolfowitz sat crossed-legged inside a sweltering reed hut in a tiny dust-choked Iraqi village near the Iranian border listening to tribal elders seeking his help to restore their way of life as marsh Arabs, which Mr. Hussein had taken away by draining the marshes.

But Mr. Wolfowitz's critics say his optimism on America's ability to build a better world has often blinded him to the motivations of people like Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress leader whose intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons, used as the primary basis for going to war, turned out to be wrong.

These critics also say that he failed to prepare a thorough postwar strategy in Iraq and should not be put in charge of a major development agency. "Paul Wolfowitz has a serious credibility problem," said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization. "He understated the cost of the Iraq war, while promoting vast distortions about Baghdad's weapons capabilities as a way to sell the conflict to the American public."

A former aspiring mathematician turned policy maker, Mr. Wolfowitz has world views forged by family history and in the halls of academia rather than in the jungles of Vietnam or the corridors of Congress.

Brooklyn-born and raised in Ithaca, N.Y., Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, 61, is the son of a Cornell University mathematician who left Poland after World War I. The rest of his father's family perished in the Holocaust.

At Cornell, Mr. Wolfowitz majored in mathematics and chemistry, but was profoundly moved by John Hersey's "Hiroshima," and shifted his focus toward politics. "One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war," he said.

He has held major posts at the Defense and State Departments, including senior foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary. After the administration of the first President Bush, he was dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

In Mr. Bush's first presidential campaign, Mr. Wolfowitz became one of his earliest advisers on foreign and national security policies.

After a meeting at the Treasury Department on Wednesday, he acknowledged the new challenge of reporting to an international board at the World Bank. "I'm leaving one very big job and going to another even bigger job," he said.

Paul D. Wolfowitz - Learn about this person!

NYT

Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a lightning rod in two major Washington institutions since President Bush took office. As deputy defense secretary, he was a leading voice within the Bush administration pushing for the invasion of Iraq, and was known as well for a hard line on issues like missile-defense systems. At the World Bank, whose presidency he assumed after being nominated by President Bush in 2005, conflict with the bank staff quickly became a staple of his tenure. Then in April 2007, those tensions boiled over after revelations that Mr. Wolfowitz had played a direct role in giving his companion an unusually large raise.

As outlined by Mr. Wolfowitz, military action in the Mideast was not to be a means to domination of the area, but rather the necessary first step toward breaking up ossified government and social systems that had made Arab countries fertile ground for terrorism. It would lead to the spread of democracy throughout the region. To his critics, the loftiness of his stated goals was less important than how unrealistic his plans were, and than what was seen as his arrogance in stamping out dissent within the Pentagon over the plan.

At the World Bank, Mr. Wolfowitz saw corruption as the entrenched obstacle that had to be overcome before the development aid provided by the bank could be effective in reducing poverty. But he alienated the bank's board, made up of representatives of donor nations, by taking actions against countries without consulting the board. Many top staff members were also unhappy over what they saw as Mr. Wolfowitz & apos;s tendency to rely on a small group of advisers he had brought in with him.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
2005: Becomes head of World Bank
2001-05: Deputy Secretary of Defence
1989-93: Under-secretary for defence policy
1986-89: US ambassador to Indonesia
1983-86: Assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs
1981-82: Head of state department policy planning staff

A lesson from the Nandigram carnage

Mohammad Isa Ansari
HT, May 11

Ever since humans have existed forced displacement has been a constant feature in world history. Compulsory displacements that occur for development reasons embody a perverse and intrinsic contradiction in the context of development.

Either for reasons of war, natural disaster, over population, economic hardship, infrastructure construction or for the needs of infrastructure development ie to build infrastructure for new highways, power generation, dams, rural and urban water supply and SEZ projects, industries, irrigation, transportation, or for urban developments such as hospitals, schools, and airports, population displacement always changes lives and shapes existences.

Such projects are, however, indisputably needed. They improve many people's lives, provide employment and supply better services. In the same way, these projects also create major impositions on some population segments due to people's loss of livelihood and their potential impoverishment.

When communities are forcibly displaced, the existing production systems are dismantled, much valuable land and buildings, and other income generating assets are lost.

Links between producers and their customers are often severed and local labour markets are also disrupted. Symbolic markers, such as places of worship, religious mela grounds and ancestral graves are disturbed too. Links with the past and with people's cultural identity is also affected.

However in recent years, one social issue that has caused intense discussion among academics, social activists and planners is the forced displacement of people from their productive assets, particularly land and housing due to infrastructure projects. Though the process of acquisition of land for setting up mining, irrigation, transportation or mega SEZ projects is not new, the magnitude of adverse impacts was never comprehended in the past as it is today.

The liberalisation of the economy, growing needs of public infrastructure in the country have threatened traditional sources of sustenance of people. More and more agricultural lands and built up properties are being acquired for the purpose. The situation is aggravated due to the conversion of agricultural lands voluntarily or involuntarily into public infrastructure.

All this has unleashed a situation where more and more people are being displaced from their communities and traditional ways of life. How many of them are co-opted into the new economic order and how many remain victims of development is the question.

There is a growing awareness of the sweeping powers of government, under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (amended Act of 1984) that empowers to acquire private lands and properties in public interest.

Growing social activism against such sovereign domain of government is not only in response to untold hardships and miseries caused to the affected people but also a protest against the very mould of development that alienates people from their traditional sources of sustenance.

Therefore, the growing pace of development under liberalisation, the intensity of displacement has also increased.

Unaccustomed to new ways of life, the affected people face a hostile situation where they have to compete as individuals, different from their community based settings in this race of development.

The past few decades have witnessed rapid economic growth in the country and the process forms a part of planned development. This is manifested in the setting up of large-scale projects in power generation, mining, industry, road infrastructure and irrigation and even in creating new urban settlements. This entails large-scale land acquisition and even demolition of homesteads.

The project implementing authorities, which used to be mostly public sector organisations in the past but have recently included the private sector in a big way, opt for compulsory acquisition of land or homestead mainly under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 and now, under the Amended Act of 1984.

The intensity of such land acquisitions has grown so high that many rural communities are threatened with separation from their traditional sources of livelihood and social networks. Therefore, the growing speed of development has resulted in a situation where more and more families, mainly in rural areas, are getting separated from their productive assets and they hardly get fair treatment from the projects in terms of their resettlement and rehabilitation.

They have no say in the legitimacy of setting up such projects as the government is empowered with legal rights in the name of public interest to acquire their property and assets under the Land Acquisition Act.

The power to acquire private property for public use is an attribute of sovereignty and is essential to the existence of a government. The power of eminent domain is recognised on the principle that the sovereign state can always acquire the property of a citizen for public good, without the owner's consent.

The right to acquire an interest in land compulsorily has assumed increasing importance as a result of requirement of such land more and more everyday, for different development projects.

The growing social activism against development projects has, however, blurred the distinction between a right project and a wrong one. If one takes the stand that present development essentially promotes consumer culture within a capitalistic framework and is not suitable for a majority of Indian people, most of the development projects can be considered as anti-people.

The growing speed of development under liberalisation has increased the intensity of such displacement to the extent that communities living in their traditional settings are getting displaced with the loss of their traditional sources of livelihood.

Once displaced, the affected people are pushed into an open-market situation as individuals competing for their survival in a hostile new environment. A majority of them prove to be losers in this new race of development.

Therefore, it is a need for objective studies to assess its dimensions, and it invites the attention of policy-makers, NGOs and social scientists for a sustainable Relief and Rehabilitation (R&R) policy in the country. In the absence of such a policy, the nexus between affected people, government and politicians is bound to cause immense damage to the country.

To sum up, the violence at Nandigram threatened to halt the inexorable march of Special Economic Zones (SEZs). In this perspective, land acquisition is seen as an offshoot of the mould of development and it drew wide attention in which thousands of affected families and like-minded people came forward against this project.

The media and NGOs not only focussed on the inadequacy of R&R programmes but also questioned the very basis of such projects. The issue is now being debated in a wider socio-political context, in which land acquisition for the development purpose is a sensitive matter and needs to be looked at in a humane way.

If there were more transparency and openness in the land acquisition process from all concerned, the suspicions would vanish.

Only monetary compensation for the land to be acquired is not a solution; the Social Impact Assessment (SIA) must also be well understood and addressed adequately.

Mohammad Isa Ansari is a social scientist attached to New Delhi-based Intercontinental Consultants and Technocrats Pvt Ltd. He can be reached at isa_ansari@yahoo.com.

What happens when the water runs out?

Kalpana Sharma
The Hindu, 8 May

One billion people in the world lack proper access to potable water. A good number of them are in India. It is incumbent on the state to ensure that the poor are not denied their right to basic necessities.

THE POWER crisis in Maharashtra has occupied many column centimetres in local newspapers. Understandably so as with the onset of summer, life without electricity is hell. It is that in any case in most parts of rural Maharashtra where daily power cuts of up to 15 hours have been the norm for many months. In cities and towns, the power cuts are shorter but still unbearable. Only Mumbai has been spared.

But what no one is talking about is the looming water crisis. One of the fallouts of climate change, the consequence of global warming, will be on water sources. The drying up of water sources will have a direct impact on water availability. As urban areas grow, their demand for water will increase. If on top of this, governments aim to provide 24 hours water to all urban residents, then the demands of the city on the hinterland will escalate hugely. Who will mediate the competing demands between urban water needs and rural survival? Already, the choice of ensuring that urban areas get power while rural areas suffer is laying the ground for inequality and injustice.

At the G8 meeting in Berlin scheduled for June 8, civil society groups plan to launch an End Water Poverty campaign. In India poverty and water poverty go hand in hand. A campaign to bring water to the poorest is closely linked with any campaign to deal with poverty. One billion people in the world lack access to potable water. A good number of them are in India.

The reason the middle class does not agitate quite as much about water as it does about power is because it has the capability to buy water. If municipal water fails, middle class localities order a tanker or two and pay. If the water is released at awkward hours, they have powerful pumps to fill overhead tanks that then ensure water on demand. If the water is not potable, they can afford purification within their homes or buy bottled water — that defining symbol of the commodification of something that ought to be freely available. For the poor, water is available for a few hours, at inconvenient times, and often of poor quality.

The solution that is being offered to deal with the water problem is better management. The government and several municipal authorities, including the one in Mumbai, argue that the problem is not just inadequate supplies of water but bad management practices that affect distribution. Mumbai's residents, for instance, at least on paper gets more water per person a day than residents in most other Indian cities. But although the city gets over 3,000 mld (million litres a day), it loses around 600 mld through leakages and theft. Therefore, officials of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) believe that more efficient management systems need to be in place.

At a recent meeting of Mumbai citizens on the water problem, a senior official from the water department of the MCGM acknowledged that 45 per cent of water meters did not work and that fixing leaking and old pipes was a major headache. Under the existing system of management, an engineer in the BMC has no power to sanction funds to fix a leak even if it is taking place before his eyes, he said. By the time he gets the requisite sanctions, thousands of litres of clean water would have gone down the drain. Therefore, like others in the MCGM, he too felt that the water crisis could be resolved if distribution was handed over to private management.

Is this privatisation of water by the backdoor? Will the municipality ultimately hand over management to private companies and gradually back out altogether from the business of water distribution? In Mumbai, an experiment along these lines is already being tried in K-East ward, an area with a population of close to one million people. A section of the local residents are strongly opposed to it.

Those opposing private sector involvement in water distribution point out that there are dozens of examples from around the world of water privatisation that has gone completely wrong. A new book, brought out by Manthan Abhiyan Kendra (Water: Private, Limited, Issues in Privatisation, Corporatisation and Commercialisation of Water Sector in India by Gaurav Dwivedi, Rehmat and Shripad Dharmadhikari) lists these failures. They range from the famous privatisation effort in Cochabamba in Bolivia that led to the overthrow of a government to others in practically every continent. For instance, between 1996 and 1999, Shenyang, in China, tried out privatisation of water. Ultimately, the state-owned company returned to distribute the water when the price of bulk water became untenable. Another telling example is from Potsdam in Germany where the unjustified hike in water tariffs resulted in the municipality terminating the contract with a private company. In Nairobi, Kenya, a privatisation contract was cancelled for similar reasons.

In most cases, people have rejected private control of what is seen as a public good. Private businesses are interested in the bottom line, in making a profit. Thus, instead of accessibility, affordability and equity, the values that dominate are financial viability and cost recovery. Although in the initial phases, there are assurances that tariffs will not be raised, in time they always go up due to apparent increased costs.

The supporters of privatisation argue that ultimately a more efficient distribution system will benefit the poor, as water will reach them instead of being wasted. Yet, even if it reaches them, will they be able to afford it? One of the schemes reportedly being considered for Mumbai, although the MCGM denies it, is that of prepaid water meters. Like a prepaid card for a cell phone, residents would have to recharge their cards and only then would they be able to access water. If they don't have the money to recharge their cards, then there will be no water. So rich or poor, you pay as you get. Except that the poor most often cannot pay.

The justification given for such systems is that lack of water is forcing the poor to buy water from private sources at exorbitant prices. In some of the most crowded wards of central Mumbai even today pavement dwellers buy their water from "bishis" — men who walk around with a leather water container slung on their backs. These vendors get the water from a private well. Because of the anomaly in our water policy, the water under the ground belongs to the person who owns the land on which a well is located while the surface water, in lakes and rivers, belongs to the government. As a result, the landless and homeless in the cities, including the slum dwellers, still depend on the mercy of the municipality, or the private water vendor. And the rates they pay work out to more than 10 times of those with access to a regular supply of municipal water.

Yet, the solution to cutting out such private water vendors is not a distribution system that is equally unaffordable. A 24-hour supply of water means little to people who will not be in a position to pay the charges if private companies take over distribution and justify raised tariffs in the name of cost recovery.

Before privatisation of water distribution is accepted, we need to have a close look at the success and failures of the private sector in water elsewhere in the world. The record has been murky with unjustified costs being charged by private companies.

While no one will argue that better distribution of water, or for that matter electricity, and cutting wastage are essential, when there are systemic inequities, such as the absence of decent housing that also means little or no water and electricity, just efficient distribution is not enough. In cities, the wastage is not just due to leakages but the profligate use of water by the better- off. Like electricity, this is the section that needs to be told about saving water, because current usage patterns will ensure that there is never enough water.

Yet, even as governments and municipalities work out schemes to bring in water to cities, they fail to launch campaigns that will make the water-rich aware of a scarce resource.

The state sector has failed on many fronts and has not necessarily been the most efficient. But good management practices and private ownership are not coterminous. Also, where equity and accessibility have to be guaranteed, it is incumbent on the state to ensure that in the name of efficiency, the poor are not denied their right to basic necessities like water, or for that matter sanitation and decent housing.

China battles Internet addiction

Pallavi Aiyar
The Hindu, 9 May

The number of Internet users rose from virtually zero in the 1990s to 137 million by the end of 2006. Of these at least 15 per cent are under the age of 18; and 2.3 million minors could be classified as addicts.

IN A nondescript compound on the southern outskirts of Beijing, groups of youngsters in military fatigues run in disciplined lines, sweat pouring down their foreheads in the noon sun. Drill sergeants bark relentless orders right in their faces, which on closer inspection are revealed to be painfully young. Inside the combat outfits many of those marching, running, and performing a variety of callisthenics are only 13 or 14 years old.

This is a military training camp, but the youngsters in question are not soldiers in training. They are in fact Internet addicts receiving treatment at a government-funded, military-run Internet Addiction Treatment Centre, located in Beijing's Daxing County.

Alarmed by a China National Children's Centre (CNCC) report that claimed 13 per cent of Internet users under the age of 18 were addicted to the Net, online addiction has emerged as the focus of a concerted campaign by the Chinese Government to battle what the Communist Youth League calls "a grave social problem" that threatens the nation. The number of Internet users in China has spiked from virtually zero in the 1990s to 137 million by the end of 2006. Of these at least 15 per cent are under the age of 18 and, on the basis of the CNCC report, 2.3 million minors would be classified as addicts.

In the last few months, local media in China have been awash with highly publicised cases of obsessed Internet game players flunking out of school with some committing suicide and even murder. In 2005, a Shanghai court gave an online gamer a life sentence after he was found guilty of stabbing a competitor to death for stealing his cyber-sword — a virtual prize earned during game-play.

More recently, in March, China's official news agency Xinhua, quoted a Beijing Reformatory for Juvenile Delinquents report stating that almost 35 per cent of its detainees were "goaded into committing crimes, mostly robbery and rape, by violent online games or erotic websites."

The Daxing addiction treatment centre is the first and largest of eight government-funded "rehabilitation camps" set up around the country, intended to address the special needs of juvenile Internet addicts. On average, the centre houses 70-80 patients, although during school vacations, the number of its wards can shoot up to 250.

The majority of the patients are 14 to 18 years old, although the youngest to have been treated at the centre was 11. Ninety per cent are male and, according to Tao Ran, the centre's director, most are addicted to online games although Internet chat, online pornography, and gambling have also been known to cause addictive behaviour.

The centre is part military boot camp, part hospital, and part juvenile detention centre. Treatment consists of a mixture of psychological counselling, drugs, and military-style discipline. Mr. Tao says the centre can boast of a 70 per cent success rate with most patients needing a one to three-month-long course of treatment.

The treatment period can however be tumultuous since the majority of addicts are involuntarily committed to the centre by their parents. The dormitory areas are thus cordoned off with prison-style metal grills and hefty padlocks. In the past patients have tried to escape. One even slashed his wrists, although quick intervention saved him.

Given its relatively recent origins, the nature of Internet addiction remains somewhat of a global controversy. At issue is whether or not heavy Internet use should be defined and treated as a mental disorder. Mr. Tao, who built his career treating heroine addicts in the 1990s, has little patience for such debate. He says that having researched and treated a variety of addictions both physical and psychological over two decades he is convinced that Internet addiction is virtually the same as other types of more conventional addictions both in terms of its symptoms as well as the negative impact it has on the addict's ability to function normally in society.

Thus if deprived of the Internet, addicts can quickly turn nasty and resort to theft and violence in order to secure money for use in Internet bars. In addition, they often stop eating and sleeping for days at a stretch causing serious harm to their health.

Mr. Tao says the patients brought to the clinic usually suffer from a mixture of anger, loss of self-esteem, depression, bad nutrition, insomnia, and lack of self-control. The military discipline at the centre helps them to regain a schedule and builds up both their physical strength and mental discipline. The intensive counselling aims to gradually restore their self-confidence and to help them re-establish positive goals. Some 30 per cent of cases are additionally treated with drugs including anti-depressants and even anti-psychotics.

Unreasonable pressure

According to Mr. Tao, the underlying cause for this trend of rising cyber addiction is unreasonable pressure from parents and schools to excel in examinations. Unable to bear the constant criticism and expectations, youngsters come to depend on the Internet as an "escape" from real world stress.

"For me online games were an environment that I could control and where there were no restrictions placed on my freedom," recalls Sun Qian Han, a 24-year-old patient at the Daxingcentre.

Mr. Sun began to play Internet games in 1998. In the beginning, he spent only three or four hours a day online but gradually his addiction grew to uncontrollable proportions. In 1999 he spent three months non-stop at an Internet Café, sleeping three or four hours at most, playing games for 20 hours at a time.

An excellent student, Mr. Sun dropped out of school although with his parents' support he finally managed to graduate in 2005, four years later than his contemporaries. He is currently enrolled at a Polytechnic in Yunnan province but every few months finds himself sliding back towards an online binge. He thus voluntarily checked himself into the Daxing Centre two weeks ago, although his parents foot the $1,200 monthly fee.

Steps to curb addiction

Over the last two months or so the government has announced a host of measures it says are aimed at curbing Internet addiction. These include an ordinance issued in March banning the opening of any new Internet bars in the country for the remainder of the year. In addition, Net bar owners have been ordered to install anti-addiction software on their computers and to be extra vigilant in collecting information on users including their real names, age, and identity card numbers.

Critics have pointed out that this campaign meshes a bit too conveniently with China's broader efforts to control the Internet. Access to many major online international news sites are blocked in China and some 50,000 personnel are employed to monitor Internet traffic, censoring information that is deemed too politically sensitive by the government.

But Mr. Sun believes the new measures will be helpful, if implemented strictly. His worry is that most Net bar owners put profit first and are thus loathe to turn underage users away or to implement any regulations that would be detrimental to their business. "All of us addicts are above average in our IQ," he says towards the end of the interview. "But our talents and energy are wasted by this addiction." Mr. Sun intends to stay on at the centre for another few weeks before heading back to his college in Yunnan. He is studying to be a software engineer.

Food shortage likely in global rush for biofuel: U.N.

John Vidal

Winners and losers in multi-billion dollar industry — small farmers at risk.

THE GLOBAL rush to switch from oil to energy derived from plants will drive deforestation, push small farmers off the land, and lead to serious food shortages and increased poverty unless carefully managed, says the most comprehensive survey yet completed of energy crops.

The United Nations report, compiled by all 30 of the world organisation's agencies, points to crops like palm oil, maize, sugarcane, soya, and jatropha. Rich countries want to see these extensively grown for fuel as a way to reduce their own climate changing emissions. Their production could help stabilise the price of oil, open up new markets and lead to higher commodity prices for the poor. But the U.N. urges governments to beware their human and environmental impacts, some of which could have irreversible consequences.

The report, which predicts winners and losers, will be studied carefully by the emerging multi-billion dollar a year biofuel industry, which wants to provide as much as 25 per cent of the world's energy within 20 years.

Last year, more than a third of the entire U.S. maize crop went to ethanol for fuel, a 48 per cent increase on 2005, and Brazil and China grew the crops on nearly 50 million acres. The European Union has said that 10 per cent of all fuel must come from biofuels by 2020. Biofuels can be used in place of petrol and diesel and can play a part in reducing emissions from transport.

Positives too

On the positive side, the U.N. says that the crops have the potential to reduce and stabilise the price of oil, which could be very beneficial to poor countries. But it acknowledges that forests are already being felled to provide the land to grow vast plantations of palm oil trees. Environment groups argue strongly that this is catastrophic for the climate, and potentially devastating for forest animals such as orangutans in Indonesia.

The U.N. warns: "Where crops are grown for energy purposes the use of large scale cropping could lead to significant biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and nutrient leaching. Even varied crops could have negative impacts if they replace wild forests or grasslands." But the survey's findings are mixed on whether the crops will benefit or penalise poor countries, where most of the crops are expected to be grown in future. One school of thought argues they will take the best land, which will increase global food prices. This could benefit some farmers but penalise others and also increase the cost of emergency food aid.

"Expanded production [of biofuel crops] adds uncertainty. It could also increase the volatility of food prices with negative food security implications," says the report that was complied by U.N.-Energy.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

THE REALITY BEHIND THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP - The flaws in the Chinese economic miracle

Jean-Louis Rocca
Le Monde diplomatique, May 2007

China, with its unique mix of authoritarian government and rampant capitalism, is often portrayed as a fast-growing and malignant cancer that threatens the rest of the world's economies. But the reality is far more complex. China is struggling with mass migration, skills shortages and millions of unemployed graduates.

China and its teeming armies of workers seem to have become the focus of all our economic anxieties. We worry that the People's Republic will become the chief demon in a futur nightmare for our world: a capitalist-communist global power that combines leftwing authoritarianism with capitalist exploitation. We fear that our own people will become unemployed because of the outsourcing of production to China, the world's workshop.

But we have to think about Chinese labour differently, and not concentrate solely on the workshop aspect of the economy. We need to take account of a disparate, sometimes contradictory mix of economic, political and cultural elements. The labour-intensive industries with their industrial revolution exploitation affect only a fraction of China's enormous population. They cannot function on their own without interconnecting with other types of labour.

Agriculture is the only sector of the Chinese economy that has not been transformed by the new capitalism. Its labour force has not been turned into merchandise; the return to small family holdings of land has not led to new kinds of labour exploitation, nor has membership of the World Trade Organisation. Only collective ownership of land, currently being tested by a growing market in "utilisation rights" (1), still shows the traditional conservatism of the state. Agricultural labour policy remains highly political. There are of course considerations of food security, but the policy also allows the government to control a population that, if deprived of its means of production and social network, could turn migrant and invade the cities.

The government's aim is not to prevent migration but to regulate it; to prevent brutal urbanisation and allow migrants to return to their villages if the economy declines. The reality fits this strategy since most migrants do not see departure as a total break with their native villages. Agriculture remains as a fallback position, while the social network provides a structure for population movements, since most migrants are introduced to their employers by friends or family.

Around 120 to 150 million migrant farmers are subject to capitalist exploitation. More than half these peasant-workers (mingong) work in factories or on building sites. The remainder find jobs in catering and hotel businesses, retailing, security or even in garbage recycling (2). Some 80% of migrants abandon their land without actually leaving the countryside. They work in local industry; 50% never leave their native province. Their working conditions are not necessarily better than those of their peers in the global-supply sweatshops on the east coast, but their experiences do not match the traditional picture of the capitalist hell that is, for example, endured by China's miners.

Leaving for the cities

The authorities have changed the way they view migrations. Their social aspect was almost totally ignored during the 1980s and early 1990s, when liberal ideas about managing the labour force blended with a view that the migrations would not be large-scale or permanent. More recent developments, notably China's membership of the World Trade Organisation, have forced leaders to look more closely at rural employment. The stagnation of agriculture, and the importance to China's growth of the construction industry and sectors that are not capital intensive, have made the migrations strategically valuable. Researchers and civil servants now predict the progressive urbanisation of a large segment of the migrants, and some believe their living conditions should be improved to boost slackening domestic consumption.

The government is even considering an economic policy for migrants which includes housing them in cities hit by property speculation, giving those with no social security access to health care, educating their children (most have no access to schools) and persuading bosses (not just
capitalists but the heads of state construction companies) to actually pay their workers. These are not just grand philosophical principles, nor are they the effect of outside influences on Chinese disorder. These vital issues will set the conditions for continued growth in relative social
stability.

A trend that could be called "social capitalism" has emerged, popular among sociologists, journalists, congress delegates, civil servants and Chinese Communist party (CPP) members, which holds that while capitalism is good, it must go hand-in-hand with social policy. Proponents believe that a mechanism for redistributing wealth is necessary; wage increases for the lowest paid would boost flagging domestic demand.

The same people defend the idea that Chinese society should become more middle class as the only way to prevent a class war between rich and poor; and they believe some migrants should have access to this new middle stratum. This idea clashes, sometimes violently but usually discreetly, with the views of the free marketeers, who disapprove of social policy. The division doesn't reflect the reformist/conservative divide, though.

Some social capitalists have a nationalistic vision of capitalism and dream of Chinese state multinationals ruling the world. Others favour amore mercantilised capitalism. The economic liberals are not united; some are ultra-liberal, others favour a modicum of social policy. A hardline economic liberal may be a virulent anti-democrat and believe that only a strong government can control the market, and be hawkish in
international relations. The labour issue has arisen at a time when a small elite, not just CCP leaders and senior officials but also "elected" representatives, leaders of mass movements and the intelligentsia, is expressing a wide variety of opinions.

Adopting a social policy for migrant workers raises financial problems and might affect the future of the Chinese economic miracle. Many leaders ask if raising the cost of labour and providing social benefits might not be detrimental to China's competitiveness. Some point to the shortage of unskilled labour in certain areas of Guangdong province and ask if it is the result of a refusal to accept the conditions and wages
offered by the world's workshop, or the result of recent massive investment to open up the Chinese west? Or is it a demographic effect of the one-child policy (3)? The answer is probably "all of the above".

Migrants are not going home

It is clear that improved wages and living conditions, especially in Shanghai and in Fujian province where employers complain less of a labour shortage, have tempted many migrants to leave Guangdong province and head north. Perhaps migrants now have better knowledge of the labour market. The recent 23% increase in the minimum wage in Shenzhen shows that the remuneration of the new working class is a major issue. The mass return of migrant workers to the country is now considered hypothetical; surveys show that many farmers believe that their own futures lie in the cities. And the development of western China is only beginning. Perhaps the geographic trend is a result of changes in production along the coastal region. Labour-intensive industries are gradually moving to central China, while the eastern seaboard is turning to higher value-added employment. This redistribution would explain the emergence of a few local social security initiatives; companies on the coast need to ensure that they have access to a better-skilled and stable workforce.

China also has unemployment, which should be remembered by those who see it as the empire of labour. The official unemployment rate may be low; 4.1% of the urban population in 2006, although this does not include unemployed migrants or "off-post" workers who have lost their jobs but still depend on their company (the xiagang zhigong) (4). Nor does it include the unemployed who have reached the end of their entitlements, or the young jobless who have never paid contributions and are not entitled to benefits. Though there has been a significant increase in job applications since 2004, these are mostly for "informal" jobs (feizhenggui) without contract or social security. In urban areas "official" jobs are in the minority. Many former state employees remain out of work or only find jobs in the informal sector as auxiliary traffic police or security guards (5).

The most recent estimates reveal a tense situation. In 2006 the state provided 25m jobs for the urban population, 9m of them to labour market entrants, 3m to migrants (that this category was mentioned at all shows how the official line has changed) and 13m to workers who had lost jobs because of restructuring in the state sector. In reality, only 11.84m work contracts with social security entitlements were created
in 2006 (6). This year 24 million young people are expected to enter a labour market with only 12m new jobs (including places left by retirees) (7). The gap will be filled in part by unofficial jobs.

Effects on the young

The repercussions of the industrial restructuring in the second half of the 1990s that ended the jobs of millions of workers are still being felt. Urban unemployment is no longer confined to the older generation of "iron rice bowl" workers. The pretexts used to get rid of them implied that this
surplus generation was unable to adapt to market change and had to be sacrificed to make way for better-educated and more adaptable youth. But research in 2005 in the cities of Dalian, Tianjin, Changsha and Liuzhou showed that unemployment among 15-29 year-olds was 9% compared with 6.1% for the urban population as a whole.

According to Shen Jie, a sociology researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences: "Most young people are in jobs with no social security or stability. They work long hours for poor wages." These are unskilled school leavers with the equivalent of a high-school diploma. They are unlikely to be in competition with the migrants for dirty jobs but do not
have the training for jobs in the new sectors.

Cohorts of jobless young people are looked after by residents' committees and street offices, the lowest administrative levels. They are given temporary tasks in the non-trade community sector such as security or maintenance, or hold low-level jobs in the trade-related activities that
are developing, such as hotels, restaurants and stores. Quotas are reserved for them in jobs considered inferior but still better paid and more highly prized than those given to the migrant workers. These young people are gradually forming a welfare-supported proletariat between the middle class and the migrants. The better off may refuse lowly jobs and live off their parents, who, if they can afford it, may send them
abroad to obtain a qualification from a second-rate business or hotel management school. (France is one of the most popular destinations.)

But unemployment also affects young graduates. These have risen from 1.07 million in 2000 to 4.13 million in 2006; by 2010, 23% of the young will be graduates (8). The Chinese economy is having trouble absorbing such numbers. They were almost half the 9 million young people who entered the labour market in 2006 expecting to find work in the "new sector". An estimated 60% of 2006 graduates did not find jobs that year.

There is a paradox; major Chinese and foreign enterprises complain of a shortage of skilled, tech-savvy labour, yet young graduates are unable to find jobs (see `Graduates without prospects', left). Employers claim that their education does not reflect market requirements, and there is
a lack of mobility among job seekers. China's development model is still predominantly based on unskilled labour. Graduate starting salaries are very low. According to a survey in 2005, 20.3% earn less than $129 a month and 65.4% get a maximum $259. These low financial rewards are hardly likely to foster a new Chinese middle class.

Few hard facts

Faced with the seriousness of the situation, the last session of the National People's Congress discussed a law promoting employment and setting some major objectives; to improve coordination between the cities and the countryside, provide free "job shop" services, remove all segregation in employment, bring in new measures for unemployed young people without university or secondary school qualifications,
develop professional training, and provide greater assistance to young graduates in finding their first jobs. But translating these measures into reality depends on what concrete measures national and local authorities will take.

There are few hard facts about Chinese labour. Surveys are infrequent and fragmentary and the categories used in official statistics are rarely reliable. The labour force is used according to political/economic thinking primarily motivated by stability. The existence of a state-aided sector limits competition between urban and migrant workers. The
state is able to keep part of the population in the countryside by maintaining a traditional sector of activity there, while restricting the flow to the cities. Modern jobs being developed in sectors such as telecommunications, finance and advertising provide jobs for some children of former state workers left by the wayside following the restructuring of state enterprises. The government enables these young people, who will fill future, or existing, employment needs, to join the workforce and work their way up to more sophisticated production.

This would not be possible with a fully centralised and all-knowing labour management policy which would result in growing unrest. The police are likely to have a different point of view of social stability in relation to migrant living conditions than would cadres in charge of economic policies or social security management, or ideological chiefs
and the official unions. These potential differences of opinion provide opportunities for action by associations defending the rights of migrants. They can explain that the best strategy is to show local government and bosses that a well-treated workforce is both more efficient and more
stable. This would gain them the support of many trade unionists who hope that the present conflicts between workers and private-sector bosses will make their movement legitimate. As one explained:"Opposing the illegal actions of capitalists does not mean opposing government policy. On the contrary, it means upholding the law."
________________________________________________________

(1) Land remains state-owned but the farmers own the right to
use it and hence to rent it.

(2) Major Chinese cities are mostly cleaned by these
recyclers who wander up and down the main streets in search
of waste that can be sold (at a low price) to salvage
companies.

(3) Chinese economists are having a lively debate on this.
See Philip Bowring, "Labor need haunts China", International
Herald Tribune, 8 April 2006.

(4) These are workers who have been laid off but are still
being paid by their work units. This category will soon
disappear and the xiagang zhigong will gradually join the
unemployed.

(5) See Martine Bulard, "China breaks the iron rice bowl", Le
Monde diplomatique, English edition, January 2007.

(6) 2006 Chinese government report.

(7) 2007 Chinese government report.

(8) See David Langue, "Chinese paradox: A shallow pool of
talent", International Herald Tribune, 25 April 2006.



Translated by Krystyna Horko

We need to talk about narcoanalysis

Sriram Lakshman
The Hindu, 2 May

Narcoanalysis is steadily being mainstreamed into investigations, court hearings, and laboratories in India. However, it raises serious scientific, legal, and ethical questions. These need to be addressed urgently before the practice spreads further.

A suspect was ` narcoanalysed' in Bangalore in a 2004 double murder case. In the drug-induced state, she spoke about a knife and purse allegedly involved in the crime but neither was recovered by the police. The outcome: acquittal owing to a lack of evidence. The judge also ruled that the narcoanalysis report and videograph could be used only for investigative purposes and not to convict suspects.

NARCOANALYSIS HAS become an increasingly, perhaps alarmingly, common term in India. It refers to the process of psychotherapy conducted on a subject by inducing a sleep-like state with the aid of barbiturates or other drugs. In a spate of high profile cases, such as those of the Nithari killers and the Mumbai train blasts, suspects have been whisked away to undergo an interview drugged with the barbiturate sodium pentothal.

This practice has also garnered support from certain State governments as well as the judiciary. Politicians have fallen into the habit of hurling the term `narcoanalysis' at opponents. In 2006, Karnataka Congress leader H. Vishwanath suggested that Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy should undergo narcoanalysis in the Chenamma Trust bribery case. The Home Ministry's Directorate of Forensic Sciences plans to expand narcoanalysis facilities nationwide. It is not surprising then that there are about 300 people in the narcoanalysis queue at the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Bangalore alone.

It would appear that the narcoanalysis beast has acquired a life of its own. It is increasingly knocking at the doors of courts and finding ready acceptance as a device to get at the truth during police investigations, though its scientific basis and value are under strong challenge. It is for this reason that the scientific, legal, and evidentiary issues relevant to the narcoanalysis debate need to be critically discussed.

Narcoanalysis is rarely used for therapeutic purposes today. The reliability of the practice has been questioned by leading psychiatric and forensic experts. Dr. P. Chandra Sekharan, the highly regarded former Director of the Forensic Sciences Department of Tamil Nadu, has characterised the practice as an unscientific, third-degree method of investigation.

It is surely significant that while `truth serums' have been in use since the early part of the 20th century, they are not used in most developed countries today. During and after the War years, United States armed forces and intelligence agencies continued to experiment with truth drugs. The CIA has admitted to using these as part of its interrogation tactics. But a declassified CIA interrogation manual says that while truth drugs can be useful in overcoming resistance not dissolved by other methods, the actual content of what comes out during the interrogation can be "psychotic manifestations ... hallucinations, illusions, delusions or disorientation." At the 1977 U.S Senate hearings on its secret mind-control project, the CIA acknowledged that "no such magic brew as the popular notion of truth serum exists."

Studies have shown that persons who make truthful confessions are those who were likely to confess had interrogators persisted with regular methods; and that persons who lie can continue to manifest a lie even under the influence of a so-called truth serum. Moreover, the investigator can induce and communicate his own thoughts and feelings to the suspect. The scientific literature indicates that if narcoanalysis has any extra-therapeutic uses, it may be in making a suspect feel that he has revealed more than he actually did. With repeated questioning, it may be possible to reduce ambiguities although these cannot be eliminated.

Two objections

Scientific scepticism and the absence of controlled studies have not deterred Indian investigating agencies from running to the FSL in Gandhinagar or, more likely, Bangalore — the narcoanalysis hub for various police departments across the country. FSL, Bangalore, conducts sodium pentothal narcoanalysis in conjunction with three other tests — psychological profiling, polygraph (`lie-detector') tests, and brain mapping. Polygraph tests, which one can learn to `pass' or `fail,' are used for screening and confirmation purposes only. Brain mapping, a premature if promising technique not entirely free from controversy itself, indicates whether a subject's brain stores experiential knowledge about a certain object. Narcoanalysis is used when investigators need oral elicitations from a suspect. For instance, if brain mapping indicates that the suspect stores information about a blue getaway car allegedly used in the crime, the narcoanalysis, according to the FSL, Bangalore, is used to provide information such as the number of the car, where it is parked, and so on.

Dr. B.M. Mohan, Director of FSL, Bangalore, claims that he has data to prove his contention that narcoanalysis has a 96 to 97 per cent total success rate. Included in the definition of `total success rate' is the discovery of information that either triggers a relevant section of the law or may be cross verified with other tests (such as brain mapping). According to Dr. Mohan, findings that discredit narcoanalysis are usually based on studies of scopolamine and sodium amytal and are not applicable to sodium pentothal, which is used by the Indian laboratories. He adds that during narcoanalysis the tendency is to sleep if not questioned, rather than hallucinating or fantasising.

There are two problems with this argument. Using sodium pentothal is not a new advance in narcoanalysis. Two experts at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore interviewed by The Hindu pointed out that internationally the psychological fraternity has used sodium pentothal for decades; and discontinued its use in all but the rarest cases, partly because there is no guarantee that the drug will elicit factually accurate information. Secondly, Dr. Mohan's contention that it is difficult to manifest fantasies in narcoanalysis is questionable. False memory is an extremely well-researched area according to Dr. Chittaranjan Andrade, a professor of psychopharmacology at NIMHANS. While patients under narcoanalysis may find it difficult to lie consciously depending on the depth of the narcoanalysis, they can say things that are not true and on the surface of their minds. Dr. Andrade explains the case of a suspect who is repeatedly accused of a crime during regular interrogation: "The same thing goes on during the narcoanalysis. He remembers `you've done this, you've done this.' He says, `I have done that.'"

When science has outpaced the development of law or at` least the layperson's understanding of it, there are unavoidable complexities regarding what can be admitted as evidence in court. In the United States, where science often interfaces uncomfortably with the law, the Supreme Court offered four criteria, part of the Daubert Standard (1993), by which to judge the credibility of a scientific principle held by a minority of practitioners: hypothesis testing; peer review and publication; knowledge of error rates; and acceptability in the general scientific community.

Pseudo-science

We must give narcoanalysis its due and grant that it has provided valuable leads to the police in some instances. However, one swallow, or even many swallows in this case, do not a summer make. It is logically consistent for even a pseudo-science to produce reliable outcomes in particular cases. The overall reliability and science behind the practice can only be determined after statistical analysis of a sufficiently large sample.

The irony of the situation we face in India is that the science behind narcoanalysis, as we know it, has not leapfrogged the courts by any stretch of imagination. The Bangalore research results and methods have been neither peer-reviewed nor published. Regarding publication of the data, Dr. Mohan says he will go public with the FSL data in three to four months (from March 2007) and is willing to debate its implications at international forums. But it is unlikely that studies based on some 300 criminal investigations will yield controlled experimental data. The feedback that goes into defining the success of the analysis is provided in part by police questionnaires. Here lurks a conflict of interest.

Legal aspects

There are other significant legal aspects to the narcoanalysis debate. In a 2006 judgment (Dinesh Dalmia v State), the Madras High Court held that subjecting an accused to narcoanalysis is not tantamount to testimony by compulsion. The court said about the accused: "he may be taken to the laboratory for such tests against his will, but the revelation during such tests is quite voluntary." There are two fallacies in this reasoning. First, if narcoanalysis is all that it is made out to be by the Bangalore FSL, the accused will involuntarily answer questions posed to him during the interview. The second fallacy is that it is incorrect to say that the accused is merely taken to the lab against his will. He is then injected with substances. The breaking of one's silence, at the time it is broken, is always technically `voluntary.' Similarly, it can be argued that after being subject to electric shocks, a subject `quite voluntarily' divulges information. But the act or threat of violence is where the element of coercion is housed. In narcoanalysis, the drug contained in the syringe is the element of compulsion. The rest is technically voluntary.

In 2004, the Bombay High Court ruled in the multi-crore-rupee fake stamp paper case that subjecting an accused to certain tests like narcoanalysis does not violate the fundamental right against self-incrimination. Article 20(3) of the Constitution guarantees this: "No person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself." Statements made under narcoanalysis are not admissible in evidence. However, recoveries resulting from such drugged interviews are admissible as corroborative evidence. This is, arguably, a roundabout way to subverting the right to silence — acquiring the information on where to find the weapon from the subject when, in his right senses, he would not turn witness against himself.

Arguments have been made that narcoanalysis constitutes mental torture. It works by inhibiting the nervous system and thus lowering the subject's inhibitions. It is not difficult to interpret this as a physical violation of an individual's mind-space.

The State police departments are responsible for generating demand for the process. The decision to conduct narcoanalysis is usually made by the Superintendent of Police or the Deputy Inspector General handling a case. A high-ranking official in the Karnataka Police told The Hindu that police departments in India have poor skills when it comes to collection, collation, and presentation of evidence before the courts. Consequently, when there is enormous pressure on a police department to solve a case, sending suspects to narcoanalysis not only buys time but also gives the impression that something concrete has been done about the case.

Some officials connected to law enforcement argue that narcoanalysis can be of great use in instances where witnesses turned hostile; rape cases where issues of consent are being debated; and cases where the investigating officer is hard pressed for time or working to disrupt offences planned for the near future, including terrorist acts.

Scope for abuse

This ticking-bomb terrorist case argument has also cropped up frequently in the media after the 9/11 attacks. It has been championed by Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who argues for legitimising torture in select scenarios, for example when a hypothetical bomb is waiting to explode. There are many arguments against the selective use of normally banned cruel practices. Authorities are likely to abuse the power to decide which situations will warrant such exceptions, even when such extraordinary situations are explicitly laid out by law. It will be difficult to find a fool-proof way to determine which suspect is concealing information about a hypothetical bomb. It will often be impossible to know if there is a bomb ticking in the first place. These questions of discretion aside, when a country claims to be committed to human rights and against torture, one may ask if there can ever be a situation that warrants a deviation from its commitment to such principles.

While the expert studies and court opinions available internationally have granted that there may be some use in narcoanalysis, the overwhelming evidence is that narcoanalysis is by no means a reliable science. In the face of a near-consensus internationally, one or two Indian forensic labs claim to have new evidence and studies claiming remarkable success rates for the process. They must now prove their claim that narcoanalysis is backed by sound science. In the absence of proof, narcoanalysis must necessarily be suspended, especially given its ethical and human rights implications.

State governments need to work with the central authorities to enhance the investigative capabilities of their police departments. The police now hand over one of the most crucial parts of the investigation to a clinical psychologist conducting narcoanalysis. Interrogation is an art as well as a science. It takes enormous amounts of training and patience — skills evidently lacking in much of the police force and increasingly outsourced to Bangalore. The central government must make a clear policy stand on narcoanalysis — because what is at stake is India's commitment to individual freedoms and a clean criminal justice system.