Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » delhi

Suspension of FDI Rules Change in India

dine — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:55:09 +0000

New Orleans Dharmendra Kumar, campaign director of the India FDI Watch Campaign (www.indiafdiwatch.org), an organizational affiliate and campaign of ACORN International, has been emailing and telling me for days that the outcry against the Indian government’s recent announcement that it would open foreign direct investment to multi-brand retail was intense and unyielding in Delhi and throughout India. The present has been led by small traders, street sellers, and birani shopkeepers. Parties on both the left and the right have been united in opposing the government’s announcement. Stories in news outlets in the US have focused on the huge opportunity they claimed would now be available to Walmart and its cohorts among other global big-box operators. Kumar tells me that they are counting their chickens before they hatch.

In recent days the India the FDI Watch Campaign has indicated to me that they believe the government will be forced to suspend their announcement of the FDI modifications in multi-brand retail. Our default position for years has been to point out to the government that even when FDI in retail has been modified in other countries, it has often been done over lengthy timelines, like the 10 year rollout in China. Countries that have moved too quickly, have always paid huge prices in terms of domestic discontent and marketplace confusion.

Watch this story. This is a political fireball in India that could scorch the government and everything in its path unless finally our demands are heard and time and due diligence are provided for existing business, communities, and workers.

Keeping Up to Date on Slavery, Yes, Slavery!

dine — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 15:03:32 +0000

New Orleans Yes, I know many of you believe that slavery ended almost 150 years ago in an American-centric view of the world, but it’s a big world, and shockingly simple to exploit people by having them work for free, which is what slavery is all about. The US State Department estimates there are 27, 000,000, yes 27 Million!, people who fit this definition of slavery.

An organization called Slavery Footprint has come up with a methodology (and $20000 in funding from the State Department) to allow you to go to www.slaveryfootprint.org, and take a quick survey to determine how many “slaves are working for you?” Yes, you! It’s worth a good, hard look. Don’t wait for the weekend!

We stumbled on this reality almost a decade ago in the second Organizers’ Forum International Dialogue when we visited India and journeyed by bus several hours outside of Delhi, the national capital, and visited a compound that was schooling and training young adolescent and teenage boys in new skills, all of whom had formally been forced to work in unpaid, slave labor in mining in the area, largely impressed for their labor in exchange for contrived, historic debt to mine owners or labor suppliers, sometimes for generations. We felt not only shocked, but profoundly naïve for not having realized that so much of this kind of forced labor was still enduring in modern times just beyond our daily recognition in the silence of sweat, hidden from eyesight by thousands of miles.

Cases involving women from Eastern Europe shanghaied for years to the west as sex slaves grab headlines in the 21^st Century. Factory workers report child sized handprints on imports from Asian on their assembly lines. Even in the United States wage theft and the kind of exploitation that finds immigrant workers at Hersey plants (see special on-line report at www.socialpolicy.org) and in Canadian agricultural fields, is really only a different distinction by a matter of degrees from such oppressive slavery.

Seems like this is something that we should be able to end completely, and if not, we should stop pretending that we stand for any kind of civilized society.

Visiting Mundka, Delhi’s Plastic Recycling Center

dine — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:46:30 +0000

Delhi We climbed onto the first Delhi Metro train at Nehru Place and after three more train transfers on this fairly amazing and new subway system, we had reached the very end of the line in Mundka in the Delhi suburbs. I wanted to see what Kaveri Gill in Of Poverty and Plastic had called perhaps the world’s largest plastic recycling hub, and certainly the center of this huge industry in Delhi, one of the world’s largest cities in a country where 70 to 80% of what can be recycled is recycled (compared to 7% in the USA for example!). I had first been tipped off to this book while meeting with Delhi-based author and former USA community and labor organizer (and current Social Policy contributor), Mridula Koshy, on my last visit to the city, and the book had proven invaluable in helping me understand the economics and markets where our waste pickers were critical field troops.

Leaving the Metro, we then walked several kilometers along the bustling highway until turning left into another world. Kilometer after kilometer, cheek to jowl, behind every wall, lean-to, and scrap of fencing were acres and acres of plastic recycling sorting areas, piled high in all varieties and bundled nearly to the sky. Workers swarmed among the mess, sorting items, stacking with the claw hooks associated in another time with dock hands, and piling all of these items onto carts, bicycles, and trucks. Here there would be a 30 foot high stack of plastic car fenders, there would be a small mountain of old plastic sandals or shoe soles, and everywhere plastic bags, electronic items, TV set covers, and the like. Take all of this and multiply for miles! It was breathtaking in every way. Workers pointed out to us the slums not far away where 4000 wastepickers lived nearby who worked in the sorting and stacking.

For 90 minutes we never stopped walking in a giant circle that took us from several kilometers from the end of the Mundka line back and around to the previous subway stop, and as much as we had seen, we hardly touched the surface of this huge plastic recycling hub. This was not an area where brokers sad with old scales, but where there were regular scales which weighed entire truck loads of plastic goods as they came in and out. The plastics would only be interrupted by street vendors serving lunch on the sidewalks to the workers or shopkeepers nestled between plastic yards selling their wares.

We were oddities. Taking pictures here and there and talking to workers and brokers seemed strange to them. This was a separate world and we were visitors from the other planet where the goods began their route. All of what we saw though was simple a stage of the process. Once assembled and sorted here, then sold and stacked, these trucks were headed to the plants that would reprocess the plastics into new products. We didn’t go there this trip, but we were confident that wherever the plastic was heading, it would be back here again some day.

Commonwealth Games Not Over for Delhi Poor

dine — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:11:42 +0000

Delhi Last year’s stubbed toes in Delhi over India’s first shot at hosting the Commonwealth Games are still in the news in the wake of continued outrage at the national embarrassment caused by the widespread corruption that revealed shoddy construction and desultory preparations. The headlines were full of charges and counter charges as the special report on accountability has been made public. For the 45,000 families estimated to have been displaced by the Games, the memories are also still vivid and the experience still a daily grind. With the ACORN Delhi organizing team, I visited the ITO community across from the now vacant athlete dormitory (waiting for condo sales!).

ACORN India with partners is operating a homeless tent across the highway from the dorms where up to 60 or more are staying nightly, still unable to find replacement housing. This is one of 84 such homeless tents pitched about Delhi and provided by the Delhi Municipal Corporation. Looking over the edge of the expressway from the front of the tent I could see recycling sorting going on all around complete with weighing areas and bundling, all crammed next to rows of bicycle rickshaws which are once again the livelihoods of many of these ACORN members. Looking through a stack of membership applications and ACORN membership cards which also serve as Ids for many of these workers, the occupations were common: rickshaw puller, domestic workers, hawkers, and waste pickers predominated.

Walking through the neighborhood nearby was a little like walking through a recycling center with walls, much like our work in Dharavi in Mumbai. Doors were open that revealed ceiling high stacks of paper goods ready for recycling and then bundling. On the streets young workers hardly in their teens used threadbare tarps to catch papers being pushed off of trucks and then readied for sorting, bailing, and weighing for the brokers. In India there is no way to separate residence from livelihood for the poor, and every step through these crowed streets with life and work spewing out everywhere, reconfirmed that reality block by block.

Dharmendra Kumar, ACORN International’s Delhi director, explained to me that we had operated the tent here for four months and despite the fact that the DMC had only provided one month’s payment with three still owing for the work, we were trying to get them to agree to maintain the shelter for a full year or more, simply because it was so desperately needed. I won’t be surprised to see it again in six months when I return, just like the empty Games housing that will still be hoping for sales, and the demands for accountability for the Games that will still in all likelihood be full of more contention than convictions. The bitter residue of the Commonwealth Games still seems short on lessons learned even as the calendar more quickly turns.

Commonwealth Games Mess and Mayhem

dine — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:13:20 +0000

Delhi Arriving in Delhi everyone from cabdrivers to front page headlines in the Times of India and every other paper led with the medal surge for India in shooting and wrestling which propelled the country to second place in early standings. They could take a small amount of pride since every other story emerging from the Games was a travesty of mess and mayhem. The karma seems clear and what goes around is coming around.

Delhi petrified about the surge of traffic closed all schools for the week and most businesses were asked to close as well. The poor were not simply relocated from the streets and slums for the construction, but causing a crises for the middle class the government forced many to return to their villages so that they were off the streets. Beggars were moved to compound housing to get them off the streets and the stories there were horrific, though as the Chief Minister said, “it is against the law” to beg.

Meanwhile no ticket prices were lowered despite the fact that the crowds were sketchy and small in all of the venues after the opening ceremony. 300 reported for squash in a venue for 3500. 10000 for cricket in a stadium for over 30,000.

And, once there, good luck. Hyper-security concerns are trumping everything so no ticket holder is allowed to bring in food or drink. Of 9 food stalls designed for the stadium the police only allowed 3 to open, so there were constant reports of people without food or drink sitting in the stands in misery.

That is if they got to the stands at all! Once again security concerns meant that parking and crowd offloading was at a considerable distance from the venues forcing everyone to walk great lengths. Additional security at the venue included coins, car keys, and books. For many if they walked back to secure these items in their cars, they couldn’t walk back to the venue in time to see the event. This is almost hilarious. Why? Police were concerned that the crowds might throw coins, keys, and books at the athletes. Wow!

Some of the athletes and dignitaries had to wait up to 2 hours to get to the Games when hundreds of drivers all recruited from neighboring states by Tata, the company providing the 1500 vehicles, simply didn’t show up for work on Tuesday, because they couldn’t work without food or water either and weren’t allowed to bring it in. Tata is a giant concern in India and whined along with all of the other contractors that the rains last week in Delhi prevented training so the drivers, all new to Delhi, had no clue how to navigate the streets and directions to the venue. Today they claimed to a Times of India reporter that they have hired a new 500 drivers, but got knows if they know their way around. It is all like reading about the Indy 500 and then learning that the GM pace car couldn’t find the track while driving in from Detroit.

The security “doors” similar to airports also didn’t work according to police. Software and hardware had not been tested so actually delayed the fans coming into the games.

The interview with the Sheila Dikshit, Chief Minister for Delhi , was a classic of Indian politics and journalism. With disaster all around and the Games devolving into farce with disappointing to non-existent crowds, she crowed at the success of the last week’s hurried preparations and her personal applause at the opening ceremony by deftly blaming the international organizing committee, the contractors, and everyone else for the well documented problems. She even added to them by pointing out that the water was scalding at the taps because no one had connected the hot and cold together at the faucets! She blamed the dog problem on holes in the fences which were easily mended, and took credit for everything while citing only the most minor things done. She left it to the Party to determine her political future at the end of the interview now that she was a “rock star.” Yikes!

The stories made clear that there were only two priorities at the Games: the athletes and the VIPs. The fans, the ticket holders, and anyone else just like the slum dwellers and the informal workers in the city be damned. They were simply irrelevant and did not exist.

Is this aberrant throwback atavism of Indian’s great culture and progress really what they wanted to showcase in Delhi?

Possibly. And, they may just get away with it. The sports pages of India and the world are hardly the place for extensive social justice commentary. They will focus on wins and losses for those who care about these games in the former British Empire.

Fort he rest it may be enough that the giant new concourses at Delhi’s international airport are now covered with carpet so thick luggage wheels almost won’t roll. I can remember vividly the drab customs lines in small, cramped hot rooms during my first visit here less than a decade ago. These have now been replaced by a huge room with no lines and crowds. There were even special customs lines for business and first class fliers which I’m not sure exist anywhere else in the world, since normally governments at least pretend that all coming to their borders are at least nominally equal.

Not in Delhi and not now.

Ps. One discordant voice from the Mail Today was Dipankar Gupta, a senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library whose piece, “Games city plays with the poor,” is in stark contrast to the Main Street boosterism everywhere. (http://epaper.mailtoday.in)

Commonwealth Games – Sheets & Toilets

dine — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 13:22:08 +0000

New Orleans In Delhi 250,000 of our slum dwellers have been displaced in order to allow the Delhi Municipal Corporation and India to preen before the dozens of countries coming to the Commonwealth Games being hosted in the country for the first time. Tens of thousands of our bicycle rickshaw pullers and other informal workers are being pushed off the streets in order to allow the city and the country to pretend that the poor are nowhere rather than everywhere, making them not only invisible but also robbing their livelihoods file this farce is played out on the world stage. This disaster led ACORN International to launch the Commonwealth Games Campaign (www.commonwealthgamescampaign.org) to try to win some support and assistance from not only India but to enlist the aid of other countries in making sure that the poor were not run over by the race to the games. With the games hardly two weeks away the piper is now being paid, the chickens are coming to roost, though little of this is giving much comfort or aid to the displaced still.

Luckily I’m writing about all of this, because if I were talking about it, I would probably be incoherent since my tongue is fixed so firmly in my cheek. Yesterday, England, Scotland, and New Zealand all stirred the pot with a roar of complaints as they inspected the athletes’ residences (whose construction affected much of the residential displacement!). The whine to BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/commonwealth_games/delhi_2010/9018515.stm) was unrelenting and included intimations by the New Zealanders that the Games

should be postponed as well as a graphic tale of one delegation finding a couple of dogs sleeping on the duvets in the quarters and using the shower for their personal toilet. If that is the case, it sounds like the quarters are the Taj Mahal compared to the conditions faced by the slum dwellers that were displaced! The secretary-general of the Delhi-based organizing committee put it all down to a difference in taste:

Bhanot explained: “Everyone has different standards about cleanliness. The Westerners have different standards while we have different standards.” But he stressed that workers have been instructed to deliver Western standards of hygiene.

I would instead put it down to bad karma for the committee’s arrogant and destructive disregard for the people who had been living and working in the area before their usurpation.

This morning’s New York Times more painfully told the story of yet more injuries, as we have continued to point out, when a footbridge leading to the stadium venue collapsed injuring 27 people, 4 seriously. In a typically cavalier disdain for the human cost of the games, it was almost as painful to read the government response:

“This will not affect the games,” said Raj Kumar Chauhan, a Delhi minister for development, who spoke at the scene. “We can put the bridge up again, or make a new one.”

It is time for the world and the media to realize that the problem in India is not a question of the ability to put on a party and adhere to construction timelines. The problem is that people have to come first, and until that fact becomes the dominant cultural sensitivity, everything else is just arrogance and artifice.

Help send the message. Please support the poor of Delhi with your signature and contributions for the campaign at www.commonwealthgamescampaign.org.

Doha to Delhi Time Warp

jstuart — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:18:31 +0000

Delhi There’s no way around it – moving half-way across the world still is a schlep, as they say, even at these prices. I climbed onto Qatar Airlines, heavily promoted as a 5 star carrier, in Dulles (DC) a little before midnight on Monday night and stepped off the plane in Delhi at 3 AM on Wednesday morning. Times flies! Tempus fugit, momento mori!

We landed at Doha in Qatar around 630 PM in the fading light between the sea and the desert. We could see the skyscrapers in the near distance from the airport, seemingly close enough to touch, rising out of the beige and browns all around. The airport seemed small, but was properly appropriate for this small country.

It did not take that long to puzzled it together though. There were two food courts. One was seemingly for tourists of sorts with a Cafe Beanery and a TCBY all of which were mainly deserted. On the other end of the airport though was a straightforward cafeteria filled to the brim. I got a cup of coffee and had a seat while trying to figure it out. At one end near me was a young Indian man sitting at a small table. Gradually, a line formed around him as he checked passports, stamped boarding passes, and handed out slips of paper. It all seemed very official. Finally, I figured it out. This was a Qatar Airlines service on the migrant streams of workers in and out of the Middle East and the Gulf countries. The lines of people, including quizzical tourists caught up in the queue were being given a voucher for a free meal of soda, rice, roll, and chicken swimming in sauce if they had a 5-hour layover between flights. All of this allowed the airport to be all things to all people, but take care of business all the same, and business was booming, filling up almost every seat back to India with the workers and the rest of us trying to save a couple of hundred on the flight.

The airport in Delhi is becoming a marvel, which is only to say that it is becoming like most of the rest of the airports in the world. Coming every 6 months, it is easy to chart the differences. First, customs became quicker when they moved out of the old room into a vast hall with fancy booths and smooth lines. Then the luggage area started identifying the flights being unloaded, another breakthrough. Now there is marble everywhere and I have to go outside before smelling the acrid smoke of the city, where the prepaid taxi line is still the wild west. Driving into the city, we passed things that looked for all of the world like toll booths next to the airport…what will await next?

The world kept moving as it does. Tiger’s team was OK with him. Duke, not surprisingly, won another NCAA title. The Yankees and the Sox went back and forth. Comcast won a disturbing round against net neutrality, auguring poorly for the FCC’s course in the future to broaden access. Maoist Naxalites killed 77 Indian soldiers in an ambush in the forested areas. A Latino was named to head the Los Angeles diocese. While meanwhile all of us migrant workers moved with the stream, back and forth, in the time warp of work for wages wherever it can be found.

Mobile Begging Courts

jstuart — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:56:50 +0000

Mumbai Seeing is believing, and indeed in the crowded streets leaving Delhi there were less beggars, where usually cars and auto rickshaws would be swarmed. I had heard something was afoot in preparation for the Commonwealth Games to be held in Delhi in 2010, and that beggars were on a short list for removal.

It seems “anti-beggary” laws had been enacted for this purpose and a huge drive was going on. I’m always skeptical of such drives, remembering all too well how our efforts at “tagging” on the streets to support organizing campaigns were often prosecuted under similar anti-begging laws in the United States. One of our organizers was even convicted of begging in Denver several decades ago! Mostly in the USA these ordinances turn on traffic safety issues, and in Delhi given the chaos in the streets that would be a hard sell.

In a new twist the Municipal Corporation of Delhi has set up “mobile begging courts,” and if that doesn’t sound like a perversion of any pretense of justice and due process, I’m not sure what does. There stand to be a dozen with two of them already up and running with 55 people already tried by such “courts.” This being India, there are elaborate screens to separate the those people who are employed, but living in the streets from those people who are, so to speak, employed in the streets as beggars. They also try to determine if this is a one-off thing or a systematic way the individual is making a living. The hard case beggars are the ones being targeted.

If “guilty,” the person is shuttled off to one of a dozen shelters, and then, if from Bihar, Rajasthan, or Uttar Pradesh, exported back “home.”

I hate to imagine the problems this involves, past the question of basic justice, which is clearly absent. The beggar camps have a max capacity of 2000, while some estimate 100,000 live in this way on the streets. Legal aid lawyers have found that most arrested in this manner are actually hawkers or laborers to whom the streets are also no stranger.

There is no question that all of this is a problem. The least the poor can do, as we know for a universal truth, is to be invisible, and of course silent. Beggars are neither.

This is a plan without a program, therefore a puzzle and paradox that must be solved in Delhi, and elsewhere in India, before there is punishment without purpose.

Waterless Urinals

jstuart — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 13:04:58 +0000

Delhi This article in The Times of India about the planning and preparations for the Commonwealth Games in 2010 is too good not to share. It has everything. It reminds me of that David Alan Cole number about the perfect country-and-western song. This is just about the perfect Indian article capturing in a vivid way part of the very special culture as well as the confusion and contradiction between public and private roles: city built latrines for the public that will pay off from the private sector and eliminate smells to boot!

Civic body plans to build 1,000 waterless urinals

New Delhi The MCD plans to upgrade 1000 public urinals to ‘waterless urinals’ in view of the Games. Two lakh litres of water will be saved by using the technology which will also take care of the problem of foul smell. A proposal in this regard was passed by the standing committee on Thursday.

These urinals will be ready by June 2010. Two waterless urinals have already been built near the Town Hall and the ISBT. The urinal near the Town Hall is used by 1000 citizens daily. While the civic agency’s engineering department will construct the urinals — at Rs 4.5 lakh each (450,000 rupees or about 10000 USD) – their maintenance and operation will be handed over to a private company. MCD expects to earn Rs 5 crore per annum by leasing out these urinals. The heart of the technology is the cartridge fitted in the ceramic pan. The cartridge is filled with biodegradable sealant that acts as a barrier between the rest room and the drainage system. Due to absence of water and contact with air, urine does not form any gas and the toilet remains odour free.

A lot of if’s, and’s, and but’s lurching in this short piece. I have a bad feeling a year from now, I’ll be reading (and smelling) something different.

Delhi Work Plan

jstuart — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:36:20 +0000

Delhi The best parts of my visits every fall to India are the hard, but necessary discussions, with organizers about work plans for the coming year, especially the long difficult parts where we try to create adaptations of organizing methods with cultural concerns and deep set community practices. After three days of discussion we seem to have settled on a solid plan and budget to move forward in 2010.

On our informal worker projects the consensus was that we needed to upgrade our efforts to create a union of hawkers especially in some of the newer developing market areas where there are opportunities and organizational vacuums. The relative stability of hawkers, their accessibility, and their ability to support the dues structure make increasing the organization there a good counterweight to the more marginal unions of waste pickers that we have concentrated on in 2009. This is such a classic problem in low wage union organizing where relatively better waged members are needed to support more marginal and contingent members, even in the United States, where within a Local 100 it takes our public school workers in Houston and state workers in Arkansas to balance our garbage workers in Dallas and New Orleans and our nursing home workers in Shreveport.

Finally, the Delhi organizers are committed to building the community organizing side of ACORN India. Most of our work has concentrated in East Delhi. A large 10 lahk (1M) population labor colony in the northeast nearby called Burari seems the most promising area for us to build the base. This is going to get exciting!

Budget is always hard, and these are hard times, but within the new COI/ACORN International framework of 50-50 shares between internal and external funds development, a new plan was embraced after long soul searching and discussion that left us all with significant goals to meet, but with the confidence that we could do it as well. The organizers believed that by signing up two to three members per organizer per day and then using the dues and special appeals, they could raise their half of the budget.

It felt good to get there, and once plan starts hitting the streets, 2010 could be the breakthrough year in Delhi!