[by Sharada Prasad CS, ERG PhD Candidate] 

 

Please watch the below video and make a note of your reaction.



Either you were amused by it or you felt a pain deep inside your heart.

Who are the people who pee in public? It’s mostly the people who work in the informal sector i.e. people who don’t work in offices or inside any building for eight hours. 94% of India’s workforce is linked to informal sector which includes construction workers, rickshaws pullers, coolies, courier boys, drivers, roadside vendors ( the list is endless) . The people who laugh (mock?) in the above video might not have engaged themselves in any activity that keeps them outdoor 8-10 hours in a day. They all appear to be either middle or upper class Indians who have the luxury of toilet access both at their residence and workplace. If empathetic enough, one can see harassment, borderline violence rather, in the above video instead of the intended amusement.

In a country with 400 million people working in un-organized sector, public toilets must be found within minutes of walking distance. The problem with urban India is that sanitation is never a priority. The municipality or corporation has no pressure from the public, especially middle class and upper class, to maintain the existing toilets, and has no money to buy/rent space in a newly developed financial neighbourhood to install toilets.

Even the toilets in railway stations and bus stations are not well maintained as there is no accountable structure in the organization to provide basic sanitation services. You will not see the phone number of any officer who is responsible to keep the toilets clean. The officials hide behind the thick veil of bureaucracy.

Yes, providing good sanitation facility comes at a cost. But lack of provision costs much more to the society. The social and health cost of lack of sanitation is not borne by all sections of society equally. The poor mostly bear the burden while the middle class or upper class insulate themselves from such woes. India cannot come out of the mess of lack of sanitation in public areas unless there is focus on accountability and enough political pressure from upper and middle class.

Dear “Pissing tanker” – Your understanding of public urination is distorted and your actions perverted. Please stop making fun of people who don’t have access to toilets. Your insensitivity towards the helplessness of people is appalling. Most people who are peeing in public are already vulnerable. You don’t have any right to humiliate those people further. If you can, please give them directions to the nearest decent public toilet, if you can find one. If you are so inclined to pee, try peeing inside a public office instead of aiming water cannons at people. You might get the attention of right people!

Cross-post from Sharada's personal blog.

Note: The views expressed here belong solely to the author of each entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.

By Zubair A. Dar 

Last week, I went down the timeline on Facebook to check my first post ever. The three words I wrote to describe my feelings read ‘waiting for azadi’. Freedom in Urdu, azadi has come to signify the sum total of aspirations of millions of people in my homeland, Kashmir, a valley perched up in the western Himalayas near India and Pakistan. In my second post, I spell out some of these aspirations as freedom from ‘curfew, atrocities and gags on freedom of speech’.

I vividly remember the days. It was the summer of 2008. We had been constrained indoors for many days in the capital, Srinagar, placed under strict curfew after widespread protests and mass gatherings. As journalists, my friends and I could do little other than make phone calls and surf the Internet for information. Venturing out to gather eyewitness accounts was synonymous with risking your life. Authorities cancelled and reissued curfew passes to us as restrictions continued for weeks. Every day, we would hear of deaths and damages to property by armed forces. Outside the first floor apartment, we would often see troopers thrashing civilians who left their homes to buy bread, milk and other essentials. The gag was choking life in many different ways – crushing dissent, preventing information exchange and breaking the backs of people by limiting access to food and essential medicine.

It was during these strangulating days that I opened a Facebook account. As New Delhi decided to continue the policy of barring text messages and confiscating newspapers, Facebook became the space to express, to communicate, to show and to expose. It was a space that cut through vertical communication structures and established a horizontal network of the people, by the people and for the people. In conflict zones and occupied territories, it proved to be the carnival where people would act vile for a day to challenge the authority of the ruler. But Facebook has since died a death many will mourn for long time to come.

Ever since I landed in the US this summer, Facebook has come to scare me. My home page looks like a psychoanalysis report. It is a reflection of everything I have looked for in the market, searched in Google or bought from an online store. Be it the furniture I like, the boots I am planning to buy, or books of my favourite genre, all make an appearance here – as if winking at me to tell me ‘we know what you did all summer’. Facebook is no longer the space I once knew it to be. It has changed, and so has every website that once inspired me.

It is sad how a democratising tool like the Internet and social media is continuously becoming a tool for capitalist accumulation. It is painful to accept that we can sometimes be fooled into believing that democracy has breathed a fresh life, for all we witness is a gasp that keeps democracy alive. It can never be confused with the triumph of democracy, with azadi, with freedom.

By Chris Hyun

"People who live in the desert dream about water." That's what my friend said, anyway.

I just got back from a short stay in my friend's small desert village in northern Rajasthan, India. It is a village covered in sand, far from any town--a village so remote that it took three phone calls and three hours to get me a paracetamol (aspirin) for a fever I was having.

One night my friend and I got to talking about dreams. We realized that we had many dreams in common: being able to fly, being chased but you cannot run, being caught without any clothes on in a public place, trying to shout but not being able to.

However, there was one reoccurring dream that he had that I could not relate with: being thirsty but not being able to find water. I have never had a dream like that. He told me that he and his brothers have had this dream many times.

Driving through desert sands near the village

In fact, this is one fear in the desert. They hear news of children dying in their sleep, literally dying of thirst. They believe that the warm winds of the peak hot season sap water straight from their babies in the middle of the night. This is why if they hear even the slightest whimper from their children, mothers wake them up to drink some water.

I was interested in learning how they survive in the desert, so I started by asking about their history, and I was surprised that it started out with violence.

Only a few generations ago, their grandfathers fought for this land. I thought, "This place had no water, no trees, no nothing. Someone actually fought for this portion of desert?" I asked, "Why?"

The reply was that they wanted a place of their own.

Slowly, I put pieces of their history together. I was mainly interested in the development of water. They told me how they had to travel for hours and hours to carry water by camel. Then finally their grandfathers manually dug the well near their home. This seemed sufficient until Germans came and told them that the water has excessive amounts of fluoride, which could lead to fluorosis. A plan was already in place to fit these remote desert villages with toilet and bathing facilities and to pipe in treated drinking water.

One old aunt laughed as she said, "I remember when they put in the tap. We were dancing and had flowers!"

The toilets seem to be doing okay, but the tap has been long dry. They say that it was getting too expensive to maintain. And that's when the canal reached their village. Basically, it changed their lives.

Looking at the canal from the water "lift"

The Indira Gandhi Canal Project in Rajasthan started in 1958--a project started to water the desert. Said to be one of the largest canals of India, it took about 35 years for the canal waters to finally reach my friend's village.

One of the biggest changes that took place is  that they can now have another growing season. In the first season, they use the canal water to grow crops like wheat and chana (chickpeas). Their second growing season, during the monsoon, is now fully taken over by one crop--guar.

Guar does not actually take that much water to maintain. Even when there was a freak rain a couple days before I arrived, guar started to grow wildly in the my friend's family field. Not a day would go by without my friend's father asking me about the market conditions for guar in the US. All I could do was throw up my hands.

The second major impact of the canal water is that they now have a fresh supply of drinking water without excessive fluoride content. However, this is regularly driven in and stored in underground concrete tanks. The nearby well water is now only used for the animals and for other domestic uses.

I had many more questions as I explored the village and the surrounding area.

• How much should the government invest in irrigating the desert?
• How much more should the village develop? When I was there there was a poorly managed health clinic and a very small shop.
• As young people become more and more educated and less inclined to farming, what is the future of such a village in the desert?
• How has watering the desert affected the hydrological dynamics and ecology of downstream communities?
• How "green" should we try to make a desert?

The benefit of greening a desert is that it reclaims land for productive use, pushing against forces of desertification.

Kids playing in the canal near the fields

I explained to my friend that in the US, we have also greened our deserts. In California, canal water from far off states irrigate fields of oranges, rice and almonds. We've been able to build cities with water parks in the desert. But has this been so wise?

People have started to plant trees in my friend's village. I told him, "Once you start planting trees, it's usually easier to plant more trees later. Trees then change the micro-climate of the area." My friend started to think about it, saying that he had not thought of that aspect of the forest--how it affects the hydrologic cycle, how it can bring water to an area.

As things slowly change in my friend's desert village, it is quite possible that they may stop having dreams of thirst and water.

And it's quite possible that they will start dreaming of new things all together.

Cross posted with Chris' blog Earth Stumbling. 

By Deepa Shinde Lounsbury

Even though they have been around for decades, microgrids have become a buzz word among energy folks lately, especially in the rural electrification world.  “Micro-grids” can be described as tiny versions of our big and mighty US electricity grid.   The houses in a village are all connected through a small distribution system to some generation source (either renewable energy or diesel – you can probably guess the kinds ERGies prefer) and viola: electrification!  This means lights for kids to read, street lights to avoid tigers and snakes at night (I’m not even joking about this), refrigerators for vaccinations, opportunities for micro-enterprises, and all sorts of other good stuff.

Juan Pablo Carvallo (ERGie, 2^nd year), Dan Schnitzer (PhD student at Carnegie Mellon and founder of Earthspark in Haiti) and Deepa Shinde Lounsbury (ERGie, 2^nd year) decided to find out what this microgrid rage was all about with our own eyes (and some human-subjects-review-board-approved interviews).  We hoped to find out who was doing what, how they were doing it, and what was “working”.  We picked India and Borneo because there were tons of microgrids in India with lots of innovative approaches and Borneo, because, well, we wondered if we might see an orangutan while we were at it.

Getting to all those places on the above map in three weeks turned out to be more grueling than I expected, but we were rewarded for our efforts and rigorous interviews with a perspective on microgrids and rural electrification that I don’t think we could have gotten from any amount of reading. 

 

Sundarbans, West Bengal, India   

The government of India is aggressively expanding the central grid and intends for every village in India to be connected.  We visited the Sundarbans, an archipelago with mangroves forests and tigers, and saw the electricity distribution system on the verge of being extended out from the mainland to the Sundarbans as we passed by on a ferry

We visited a PV microgrid  built by the West Bengal Renewable Energy Development Agency on one of the islands that had been operating since 2001.  We also saw lots of cows and lush scenery!
 

Patna, Bihar, India

Father Paul showed us around the solar research center he manages (left).  Bihar’s electricity grid is notorious for its unreliability and Father Paul leads research efforts on appropriate solar technologies associated with water heating, sterilizing medical equipment, solar refrigerators, etc.

We stayed at the dorms on-site for two nights and were amazed by their hospitality. The other two nights in Bihar were spent on 14-hour bus rides to and from Araria, where we visited microgrids built by Desi Power.

With my own eyes, I got to see how rice husk (above), an agricultural waste, can light up a village using a biomass gasifier built by Husk Power Systems (below).

Araria, Bihar, India   

Microgrid operators can be female too! She operated a biomass gasifier microgrid built by Desi Power. Desi is committed to gender equality and supports a number of initiatives to empower women in Bihar, along with its microgrid work.

Sabah, Malaysia

The roads through the rainforest in Borneo were absolutely insane.

We stayed in two different villages with micro hydro-powered microgrids installed with the help of NGOs Tonibung and Green Empowerment.
 

We swam in a beautiful river and crossed some picturesque bridges through the jungle like this one.
 

While doing an intense series of operator interviews, we ate rambutan and other tropical fruits. 

  We didn’t see any orangutans, but I did get to meet lots of village puppies who reminded me of own my little Thai mutt at home in Oakland.

If you want to know everything about our micro-grid safari, you will just have to read my master’s project, but for now, those are a few highlights of the trip (with props to Dan for his awesome photos).

 

Written by Jess Goddard

Pre-monsoon days in the city of Dharwad are peppered with the rhythmic honks, beeps and stops of barreling buses, autos, cars, motorbikes, parades and swarms of people rushing to work or to the market. Spending three months last summer for field research in central Kannada, the daily buzz of life in India transformed from the jarring whirlwind of my first week - 40°C traffic maze, an obstacle course– to a steady, deliberate hum of humanity, existing. This is indeed a poetic rendering, but my perception of the noise, heat, and busy streets truly changed, and I began to love what the street symphony of life in India actually echoed: kids whizzing by, 12 to an auto, backpacks bulging but perfectly oriented, from the rickshaw doors; boys herding buffalo throughout the unconstructed, green patches of land in the city; the hours of cooking – rolling roti, pressure cooking rice, sautéing okra, capsicum, eggplant, spices, spices, and more spices; the deep, cultural connection of most people to their family, their religion, and to India.

This impression is not unique where India is concerned in the blogosphere. Many a traveler pass through this enormous, history and culturally dense place with visions to be revised, expectations that turn inside out, and notions that fall flat as fictions after just one night in the coach car rail. The railroads are veins of lifeblood in India, connecting the smallest towns to the world’s largest cities, and they seem to shape the experience of all that they carry. While I swallowed the guilt of my cinematic romanticism, the moment I jumped onboard the first train to visit our colleague’s family home in Davanagere, scenes of Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson’s brilliant film set some 2,500km north of where I actually was) flooded what was forming as memory—the enormous insulated bags carrying home cooked meals for the long journey ahead; the smell of samosas, dosas, and the sound of chai wallahs singing their hot spiced milk tea; and of course the rainbow of textures and colors flowing around me. There are no dull moments on the trains save for the late hours on overnight sleeper car rides, where solo travelers are treated like guests by traveling families. Being poorly prepared without a carry-on meal (though slightly excited to try the suspect train food) on another journey for 24 hours between Hubli and Ahmedabad, families around me quickly filled up plates of food and fed me until I was too full to imagine ever eating again. I stared for hours on end at a countryside whose red soil and palm trees slowly morphed into the drier and less tropical north-west. The land seemed limitless and empty despite holding over 1.2 billion people, until I realized I had been staring at farmland for nearly the entire journey – the earth-pantry for 1/6th of our planet!

Farming pushes forward using alternate irrigation sources (wastewater and borewells) during a weak monsoon season in Southern India in 2012. Photo Credit: Sharada Prasad CS

Much of this farmland is dependent on the freshwater from yearly monsoons, but the weak rains of 2012 made it clear that farmers reliant on the monsoons for freshwater irrigation were going to suffer. Agricultural production in the country was vulnerable to extreme uncertainty around when and why annual precipitation was 12% below average, a rate that when scrutinized month to month and by region reached percentages as high as 70% in July for the Punjab region. The WMO anticipated that climate change will increase the erratic nature of draughts – having effects from the micro to macro scale (food prices increased 7% between April and July 2012 primarily in response to high grain prices, crops severely affected by global draughts). Returning to the U.S. in mid-August to a similar state of draught-induced fear for food prices and farmer livelihood after the hottest year on record across the U.S., the reality of our global connectedness and the consequent unified environmental impact felt more heightened than ever.

Let’s hope and work towards renewed consciousness and stronger environmental policy for 2013. Keep your eyes and ears well tuned on ERG’s blog and with some great voices in the blogosphere on the climate and environment subject: Guardian’s Environment, NYT’s Green, Orion Magazine’s blog, Real Climate, Climate Progress, Grist, Environmental Graffiti.

Bollywood dancing is just one of the many talents that can be found at ERG! :) Enjoy!