(by John)
And this time a blog to do...
It’s Thursday. We start with a power breakfast with our mentors from Dasra and a briefing on our next leg of our journey. This is to the Tsunami hit area south of Chennai. What can I say ? The locals had been overwhelmed with – not the great wave we think of from Phuket – but a rise in sea level of around 7 meters. Enough to kill around 16,000 people
The people then had to endure an onslaught by a tidal wave of NGO activity: the second Tsunami. Of random acts of kindness and well meaning and contradictory advice. It’s not to be critical of the NGO effort. People wanted to help and help was needed quickly. But it had some real failings due to lack of co-ordination and perhaps some sloppy thinking. The nearest villages to Chennai got most of the NGO visits because – well it was the shortest drive. They got so much stuff, some households ended up with ten sets of cooking pots and the fishermen were supplied with rather more fishing boats than they really needed. Comical really – but… Basically the pattern had been that a boat would typically have a crew of four men. Post the tsunami – there was one boat per person. Fantastic – every one is a captain.. with no-one to crew. Quite a screw up.
And it’s not ending there. The Indian Government used the Tsunami to clear the poor families back 2 kilometers from the beach leaving land available to be snapped up by developers to put nice resorts along the beaches. And that’s what we saw as we followed the coast road South: A frenzy of development. Of course there’s a lot of development in India but this post Tsunami land grab is a bit distasteful.
There are hard questions that well meaning NGO’s should think about regarding this post tsunami work. No doubt there was good and well targetted aid. But what was the clown thginking about who sent a container load of Levi Jeans ?
I’m not too comfortable criticising the NGO effort. They did the best they could, making instant decisions. I’d say the most disturbing thing was how uncharitable the village communities proved to be to each other. In one community a community leader sent an NGO further down the coast where aid was needed more. His fellow villagers came round that night threatening to kill him. The NGO’s goods had a resale value. It made me wonder if the NGO effort had actually done more harm than good?
Man’s inhumanity to man is pretty striking in this story. Aid was delivered to the panchayats or village governments in the villages. It was then allocated by the panchayat – supposedly by need – but other factors came in. The Dalit (untouchables) got little of the aid. In some cases NGO’s oversaw aid distributed fairly, only to go away and then the panchayat took the goods back from the Dalit, to redistribute.
Our project visit, two hours out of Chennai was to the Grassroots Foundation. They do various projects (including children’s rights and education) but our visit was to a Dalit community, who live next to an old canal where they subsist by fishing. They are not allowed to fish in the sea by the caste fishermen. Instead they catch fish by hand – no question of any of the spare boats being redistributed in their direction.
Our discussions with the villagers were pretty upsetting. They reminded me of a ghetto – akin to a prewar Jewish Ghetto – where the dominant culture would really rather thay did not exist. It unfolded there was really loads of problems. They’re suffering reduced income from fishing because the creek was partly infilled by the Tsunami.
They got no help from the NGO’s in the Post tsunami gold rush. Aid went to their local panchyat but none to the Dalit community. This despite it being illegal to discriminate against them. Presumably their share has been allocated to caste villagers.
The Dalit actual concerns they talked about were about better housing and they have an access problem caused by the weird caste divisions. They are prevented from sending their children to school and to cross the road to the village. They have protested about the access – doing a demonstration which led to 7 of them being arrested and awaiting trial.
We left the visit both charmed by these friendly and smiling people and in my case at least pretty upset and disgusted by the treatment that these Dalit had received from their dominant caste communities. And distressed because it’s so hard to see what effective intervention would work for this group. They have good support from Grassroots – and we suggested that perhaps Elango, from the Panchayat Academy might be able to help. It’s such an intractible problem. Caused not by some terrifying act of nature but by the low, systematic and deadly discrimination that only people are capable of…
Ho hum…
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