World is Green : Suhit Anantula's Blog on Rural India

Wireless system puts rural poor in touch

[Category : Green Technology ]

China Unicom has set up set up a wireless communications hub in rural China with the equipment provided by a Canadian firm, Wi-Lan.

Factory workers living in a far-flung industrial estate in China are calling home using a type of wireless technology that could soon be shaking up communications worldwide.

The workers walk a short distance within the Dongguan estate in Guangdong province to a wooden shack housing a communications hub set up by mobile phone operator China Unicom.

There, they send e-mails and make cheap voice calls to loved ones in distant villages using wireless internet technology supplied by a Canadian firm, Wi-Lan.

Wi-Lan's equipment provides a wireless broadband network that spans a radius of more than 5km from a base station, linking the estate to the rest of China Unicom's network.

The technology shares similarities with a new international standard called WiMax, a high-speed, long-range version of the popular Wi-fi wireless internet technology.

While the technology is expected to lead to new internet and telephone services in rich nations, Wi-Lan sees huge opportunities for wireless broadband to meet the communications needs of some of Asia's poorest people.

"In remote regions in China, there may not be enough phone lines covering an area, so this works like a public phone concept but without the cables," said Wi-Lan Asia-Pacific sales director Kia Chong.

Mr Chong said Wi-Lan had installed 137 base stations linking up 324 remote sites for China Unicom in Guangdong under the first phase of the contract since May last year. Under a second phase, it will install another 120 base stations connecting 350 remote locations.

The Toronto-listed company, which has a market value of US$85 million, derives 15 per cent to 25 per cent of its revenues from the Asia-Pacific region.

In India, another huge growth market, Wi-Lan has supplied US$500,000 worth of wireless broadband equipment to the Gujarat state government.

That network provides voice, video and data links between key agencies such as the district court and community hospital within one township.

"The productivity benefits are enormous. The state government could have built the infrastructure with traditional copper and fibre, but that would have taken months, if not years, to lay them out," Mr Chong said.

Telecoms operators in Asia could migrate to WiMax once the various equipment manufacturers ensure their systems were compatible with each other, which was likely from the first quarter of next year, Mr Chong said.

Wi-Max is the best solution for rural and Urban India.

Transforming Rural India, The Hub Way

[Category : Green Thinking ]

Rajesh Jain writes in the Business-Standard about the need to make a difference between two elections in India and provides RISC as one of the possible solutions for this.

If there was one message which rang out loud and clear in the recent elections, it was that the poor of India want a better life. They voted for change – dispensing with those in power. This was not so much about “anti-incumbency” as “anti-incompetency.”

Even as India makes strides in some sectors, much of the country and its people remain frozen in time. They will have to make do with the promise of free electricity – if the state governments ever get around to generating it. Bharat wants its own revolution – one built around development and opportunities, not handouts and freebies.

So, let’s play a game of strategy. You are the Indian chief minister who has just won the local mandate. Success is defined as getting re-elected in five years’ time (let us assume there are no mid-term polls). How do you do it?

A look at the history books offers no relief. Eminent reform-minded brethren of yours – like Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh, S M Krishna in Karnataka -failed in the last round of the game which took place.

Do you think reform or do you think populism? Do you think short term or long term? Do you think caste politics or computer policies? Do you think social development or infrastructure development?

As you think, let me give you my thoughts. The need of the hour in India is, very clearly, the transformation of rural India – not between two generations, but between two elections. Agreed, this is not something which can be done overnight.

But let us remember that you have five years’ time. The right steps taken in the beginning can make a big difference in that period. The problem in India has been that few are willing to think that far ahead as they caught up in day-to-day politics and month-by-month survival.

What you need to do is to create a platform for rural development. It is not about providing free food and electricity which will only sap the economy further, but about creating a framework in which the people’s incomes increase to a point where they can pay for food and electricity. To use an old adage, “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.”

Rural India needs affordable services – from education to market access, from telecom to healthcare, from financial intermediation to entertainment. The key issue in rural India is the non-availability of services at affordable prices. Linked to this is the lack of perceived opportunities in rural areas. These twin factors create a situation in which few want to do business in rural India.

It also leads to the exodus of people from rural areas to urban slums, which stretch the resources in the cities and towns even further. In other words, rural India is caught in a trap that it seems difficult to get out of. Which means…are you doomed to lose the next elections?

No! There is an alternative – and for that we have to turn to a model proposed by
Atanu Dey and Vinod Khosla. This model, called Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons (RISC), holds the potential to transform rural India for a capital investment (not necessarily by the government) of no more than Rs 200 per person.

The model recognises the fact that resources are limited, and we can get the maximum leverage by concentrating investment rather than by distributing it at uneconomical levels.

What Dey and Khosla propose is the creation of 5,000 rural hubs across India, each catering to a population of about 100,000 or about 100 villages, such that the hub is no more than a “bicycle-commute” distance away for people in the villages. These hubs will have about 10,000 square feet, built at a cost of about Rs 2 crore each. They will have state-of-the-art infrastructure – including 24x7 electricity, broadband connectivity, security and sanitation.

This standardised infrastructure reduces the costs of operation for service providers in rural India. From the point of view of the rural populace, there is one place where it can get multiple services – services which were hitherto not available or too expensive.

This also creates the platform for budding entrepreneurs to make rural supply and demand chains more efficient, much the same way as the programming interface of an operating system allows software developers to build higher-level constructs without worrying about the low-level plumbing.

Says Atanu Dey: “Fundamentally, the specific market failure that RISC addresses is that of coordination failure. RISC is designed to coordinate the activities of a host of entities-commercial, governmental, NGOs. It synchronises investment decisions so as to reduce risk. It essentially acts as a catalyst that starts off a virtuous cycle of introducing efficient modern technology to improve productivity that increases incomes and thus the ability of users to pay for the services, and so on. It creates a mechanism that reduces transaction costs and, therefore, improves the functions of markets.”

The total investment of about Rs 10,000 crores is very little money in the Indian context today. The multiplier effect that it can have on rural India is dramatic. More importantly, it will get you elected. We all win, right?

[A link to download the RISC paper is available from www.deeshaa.com/risc.

A Bright Idea

[Category : Green Thinking ]

Edward Cherlin, a Simputer Evangelist, pointed out this solar innovation in a post in ISTT.

WHEN Gautam Malhotra, at the age of 26, threw away the nearly half-a-lakh-per-month pay packet as COO of a website in Delhi, he was not switching jobs. Instead, he was chasing his dream.

‘‘When I was doing my B.Com second year in Pune, I happened to lay hands on a brochure on wind-power generation. I was struck by how what should have been the cheapest way to generate electricity was, at the time, the most expensive,’’ says Malhotra, sitting in his friend Tilak’s factory in Noida.

Today, he makes ‘plant-and-play’ mounted solar lamps that sell for around Rs 6,000 each, roughly a third of what similar models cost. This, he hopes, is the first step towards realising his dream of bringing renewable energy to the people.

‘‘It was just a matter of innovation, an intriguingly rare quality in this field,’’ says Malhotra. He and his NID graduate friend Tilak Lodh have developed what they claim is the world’s only LED (Light Emitting Diode) based street lamp.

‘‘The basic model, which may be scaled up later, gives as much light as a 15-watt fluorescent lamp. Just buy one, dig a hole and forget it, it will take care of itself for years,’’ says the post-graduate in international business.

The ‘Monster’, developed at over Rs 1.6 lakh, has been included in the ‘Design Business Incubation Programme’ of NID for refinement. ‘‘By using super-bright LEDs, the lamp consumes less power and can give light for at least 12 hours even on the cloudiest of days,’’ claims Malhotra.

Now, more than two-and-a-half years after he took his leap of faith, Malhotra’s worries seem to be vanishing faster than the ‘Monsters’ rolling out of factory. ‘‘For the first seven months, I could not sell even a single item. But today I needn’t worry; with innovation, such products gave a bright future. I will be only too happy to be part of that change,’’ says Malhotra.

He’s currently working on getting the next series of lamps, called the ‘Ugly Duckling Series’ meant for gardens. These should be out in the next two months. Having made 160 lamps so far after starting production three weeks ago, Malhotra hopes that with the help of NID, he will be able to find investors to expand production. ‘‘I am also waiting for a feedback from the people who buy these lamps. If it’s positive, then the sky is the limit.’’

Rural consumer durable sales up

[Category : Green India ]

Business Line reports of the E-boom in Rural India.

The E-boom has finally hit the rural India. Long thought of as a luxury and domain of urbanites, an E-revolution is silently hitting the rural homes as colour TVs, refrigerators, air conditioners and microwaves become a household sight in villages and small townships.

Products like microwave and air conditioners which are considered to be very urbane have penetrated the semi-urban markets and experts say that a study of the rural cross-section shows that in villages in a place like Punjab a sarpanch would have all the gadgets from vaccum cleaners to microwave and AC in his house.

The latest report by FICCI pegs the growth of consumer durable goods in the rural markets in the last financial year at around 25 per cent as against 7-10 per cent in its urban counterparts, rural India becomes the next destination for consumer durable goods sector.

The report shows buoyant trends in consumer durable goods sector heralded by colour tvs and refrigerators, followed by AC, Microwaves and other electronic gadgets paving the way for further investment in the rural sectors.

Rural markets have not been tapped in such a big way and there is a lot of potential for growth says Mr Anil Arora, Marketing Head, LG Electronics and adds, in last financial year we have achieved a turnover of Rs 4,500 crore out of which 55 per cent was contributed by the rural and semi-urban markets.

With the current monsoon expected to be normal this trend will continue.

Poor States Must Fight for Trade

[Category : Green Thinking ]

Kofi Annan says ``What we lack is a development-friendly trade regime. That may be changing,'' Annan told delegates in Sao Paulo, Brazil's industrial and financial hub. opening the U.N. trade and development summit in Brazil.

World trade is opening up to poorer nations and they must fight on for market access as they try to boost business between themselves, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said on Monday.

Opening a 180-nation U.N. trade and development summit in Brazil, Annan told poor nations to raise pressure on wealthy states for access to farm markets and slash tariff barriers to combat what he called ``discrimination'' in global trade.

``What we lack is a development-friendly trade regime. That may be changing,'' Annan told delegates in Sao Paulo, Brazil's industrial and financial hub.

He spoke a day after rich and poor nations met on the summit sidelines and said they had broken a nine-month deadlock in world trade talks by agreeing to put farm trade reform at the center of negotiations.
The 11th U.N. Conference on Trade and Development aims to create what Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has called a ``new economic and trade geography'' favoring poorer people and poorer countries.

Lula told delegates that Sao Paulo's corporate towers next to stinking shantytowns showed the ``contradictions'' in Brazil and the deep wealth inequalities Latin America's largest economy must fix.
Lula, Brazil's first working-class president, noted that poor nations' annual per capita income had barely risen from around $200 in the 40 years since Unctad was formed. Rich nations have seen theirs triple from $11,400 to $32,400, he said.

Lula called on another 40 developing nations to join a 44-nation system to break down mutual trade barriers. The United Nations estimates that poor nations could generate an extra $15.5 billion in trade if they cut by half tariff barriers they use to protect certain industries and crops.

``It's a new geography to build the confidence of the majority of the planet. It will soon bring better understanding between rich and poor,'' the former metal worker said.

Poor nations' access to lucrative farm markets is an obstacle as a July deadline looms in the Doha development round of World Trade Organization talks meant to create an extra $500 billion for the world economy.

The European Union has offered to eliminate export subsidies, and reduce other tariffs and barriers to farm trade with poor nations.

The United States said on Sunday it recognized that farm trade was the key to reaching a July deal and would push to prevent another collapse of talks like that in Cancun, Mexico, last September.

Annan said the Doha round would only succeed if poor nations were granted full access to the markets of the industrialized world and farm subsidies were eliminated.

Some comments on the BBC site.

Free Power Politics

[Category : Green Thinking ]

Rajesh points to an article by Swaminathan Aiyer on Free Power.

Free power for farmers is not free at all: it is paid for through greater illiteracy, ill-health, unemployment and lack of road connectivity for the poorest, remotest areas. Free power is a cancer that spreads and has many other ill-effects. Consider these in turn.

First, because power is free but intermittent, many farmers do not bother to switch off their pump-sets. So they end up consuming power that they do not need, at the cost of those that do.

Second, many farmers have obsolete, power-guzzling pump-sets, but do not replace them with energy-efficient ones because power is free. If power is priced correctly, farmers will have an incentive to replace energy-guzzlers with energy-conserving equipment.

Third, free power encourages water-guzzling crops, and so can be environmentally disastrous. Low-rainfall areas like Punjab and Haryana simply should not be growing water-intensive crops like rice. Pumping water for such crops causes the water table to fall inexorably. These states urgently need to revert in the kharif season to crops like maize, which need much less water.

But as long as water is free, farmers will opt for rice. The high price of rice reflects the huge amount of water it requires, yet the cost of water is not felt at all by the farmer, only by the environment. In effect, the farmer is being subsidised to ruin the environment. Not just Punjab and Haryana, even other low-rainfall states like Maharashtra grow water-guzzling crops like sugar-cane that should only be grown in heavy-rainfall regions.

Fourth, free power deprives the poor of drinking water and small farmers of irrigation. When the water table falls because of over-pumping, no water is left in shallow dug wells supplying drinking water and small-scale irrigation for small farms. Millions of those that can least afford it have been deprived of water this way.

Fifth, as the water table falls further, shallow tubewells run dry. So medium-sized farmers are also hit. Ultimately the deepest tubewells, affordable only by the rich, are the only ones that can still tap the water table. A recent World Bank analysis of power subsidies in Andhra Pradesh showed that large farmers got an implicit subsidy of over Rs 50,000 per year, small farmers got around Rs 8,000 a year, and landless labourers got nothing at all.

Sixth, shallow tubewells are fitted with inexpensive centrifugal pumps, affordable by small farmers. But such pumps can lift water only from a depth of 30 feet or so. When the water table falls further, lakhs of centrifugal pumps are render unusable. They have to be replaced by expensive submersi-ble pumps. This constitutes a huge waste of existing equipment and an enormous, avoidable cost in new submersible pumps.

He also links to a very good article by Gurucharan Das on FDI. He says ‘‘Face it, Mr Das, Indians are a great people, but your red tape is the killer,’’ was the conclusion. I had tried to put up a brave front in the meeting, but as I trudged back to my hotel I had a sickening feeling in my stomach. I consoled myself thinking, why does it matter to India ’s poor what 15 rich Americans think? But I knew in my heart that it did matter — if these men invested, others would follow. And this would create jobs, bring technology, make India competitive, bring revenues to the government, and this in turn would make it possible to invest in village primary schools and health centres. This is how China has been lifting its poor, and this is why P. Chidambaram so desperately wants foreign investment.

Capitalist Marx and socialist Smith

[Category : Green Thinking ]

Manas Chakraborthy writes a very interesting piece on how Marx and Smith think of Capitalists.

Marxists, everybody knows, are rabidly anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation, anti-free trade dinosaurs, which is why the markets shudder every time one of them opens his mouth. But few people, including present-day Marxists, bother to find out what Marx actually had to say about capitalism and globalisation. It turns out to be quite a surprise. Contrary to what most people think, Marx was an ardent globaliser, and his hymn to capitalism in the Communist Manifesto needs to be quoted at length. “The bourgeoisie,” says Marx, “by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.” Simply put, capitalism is civilisation. Capitalism “has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals”. It has “created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together”. Consider his opinion about the global market, opinions that could easily be echoed by capitalism’s most eloquent advocates, “Modern industry has established the world market... This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.” Globalisation, according to Marx, even leads to world peace: “National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.”

Moreover, Marx believed that capitalism was a vast improvement on the earlier, pre-capitalist “Asiatic mode of production” prevailing in countries like India, and that the global diffusion of capitalism would help developing countries.

In 1867, he wrote: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”

In short, Marx believed that it was only after capitalism spread out all over the globe, displacing pre-capitalist forms of society and economy, that the time would be ripe to usher in communism.

Of course, he lost no opportunity of pointing to the injustices of capitalism, but note how different his vision was from the views held by latter-day Marxists.

Moreover, Marx believed that capitalism was a vast improvement on the earlier, pre-capitalist “Asiatic mode of production” prevailing in countries like India, and that the global diffusion of capitalism would help developing countries.

In 1867, he wrote: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”

In short, Marx believed that it was only after capitalism spread out all over the globe, displacing pre-capitalist forms of society and economy, that the time would be ripe to usher in communism.

Of course, he lost no opportunity of pointing to the injustices of capitalism, but note how different his vision was from the views held by latter-day Marxists.

He concludes :

Putting it simply, there is much in Marx that is pro-capitalist, and much in Smith that is not. Marxists, as well as popular opinion, need to recognise that fact.

Most importantly Marx believed that Communism was the end stage in the economic development cycle which needs to pass through Capitalism first. The wealth needs to be created before it can be distributed.

The Socialists in India did not understand this simple truth.

Thought for the Day : Charles Handy

[Category : Green Quotes ]

"In Africa, they say there are two hungers, the lesser hunger and the greater hunger. The lesser hunger is for the things that sustain life, the goods and services, and the money to pay for them, which we all need. The greater hunger is for an answer to the question "why?", for some understanding of what that life is for."


Charles Handy, The Hungry Spirit

[Via Evelyn Rodriguez]

Urban misery or Rural poverty?

[Category : Not Yet Green ]

O P Mathur writes an open letter to the Prime Minister of India. The Common Minimum Program of the new government is promising changes in rural infratructure and agriculture which are important to decrease rural poverty. But he rightly questions the need to decrease the "Urban Misery".

Living in Bombay provides a first hand experience of "urban misery". The first glimpse of the city is unnnerving to many people. The combination of high skyrises and slums present all over the city. Almost 50% of people in this megapolis live in slums. Apart from the lackof basic infrastructure the cost of basic services is also very high. This increases the misery many times. The problem with Urban poverty is different from rural poverty. For instance Food is generally the least of the problems which could be the case in some parts of rural India. But the quality of life is so low.

Families live in one room houses with kitchens and bathrooms on the road. The open sewage system passes under the kitchen platforms withthe vehicular and dust pollution acting as spices. There are options of clothes, entertainment and other goodies in the urban area but this is accompanied with what can be called "relative poverty". The combination of abundance and poverty paired together in this city accentuates the misery and increases the aspiration of people.

Mathur writes :

By one estimate almost 40% of Indians will live in Urban areas by 2020. The present infrastructure is bursting at the seams and if serious steps are not taken then we will be making life for millions of urban Indians a nightmare. If this assessment is valid, then, your government has a difficult choice: a choice between giving priority to agriculture and development of rural areas and infrastructure, and to enhancing the urban poor’s access to basic necessities of water, road and power and to developing growth strategies that will have a large employment potential.

Indications are that the new government will give primacy to agriculture and rural areas. Almost nothing has been said about our cities and towns, the misery and decay that characterise them, or about the 60 to 70 million people who live in slums and jhuggi-jhopris.

Nor has anything been said as to how cities and towns have been consistently neglected by governments in the past, ostensibly on the ground that “India lives in villages”.

Even the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) makes only a passing reference to urban renewal and slums, diluting what the Congress had committed to in its election manifesto.

The purpose of my letter is to request you not to ignore our cities and towns. They are crucial for economic growth and poverty reduction. They constitute a key component of any strategy that aims at enhancing India’s competitiveness in the global markets. Nearly 52 per cent of the country’s GDP originates in India’s 5,500 cities and towns, making them far more productive compared to their rural counterparts.

In recent years, cities and towns have become the most-favoured destinations for foreign direct investment (FDI). The seven largest cities — namely, Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Ahmedabad — are said to have garnered 40 per cent of the total FDI approved till January 2002.

Cities and towns are under severe stress and strain when we look at the level of infrastructure and services. In 1999-2000, nearly 49 per cent of the urban households were without access to potable water within their premises. Water insecurity and conflicts over water are now pervasive, and have reached alarming proportions.

Approximately 30 per cent of the urban households have no access to sanitation facilities within the premises, and are forced to use open spaces. As cities have expanded, public safety systems have broken down and led to a disproportionate rise in violence and crime.

He suggests three areas of change :

Enhancing the level of investment into urban infrastructure and cities: Public investment in city-based infrastructure such as water supply, sewerage systems, solid waste disposal, roads, and public safety has been stagnating.

Create conditions for land and property markets to function: Land and property market — that is, a market where people can buy and sell land and property does not exist in India. One would be surprised to see how few land- and property-related transactions take place that could be sustained legally.

Revive municipal institutions: Municipal institutions came into existence in India in the latter part of the 19th century, and have subsisted since then, with little change in their format and even substance.