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Friday, December 3, 2010

An Ill Wind

By Rajiv Desai


This article appeared in Chicago Tribune, 24 years ago (November 30, 1986). It was the cover story in the paper's Sunday magazine.


It was a cold, clear night in Bhopal on Dec. 2, 1984. At the Union Carbide India Ltd. pesticide plant, the night shift had just begun. It was around 11:30 p.m. Soon, a catastrophe would strike and sear the name of this central Indian city into the world's consciousness.


The plant stands on a 100-acre lot in the northeastern part of the city. In the central area of the plant was the unit that produced methyl isocyanate (MIC), a toxic and volatile chemical used in the manufacture of a line of pesticides patented by Union Carbide Corp., the parent company, headquartered in Danbury, Conn.


Near the MIC unit were three huge storage tanks where the liquid methyl isocyanate was stored. From tank No. 610, the one closest to the unit, came the hissing sound of gas escaping under pressure. A white cloud formed and began to drift in a southeasterly direction toward the Bhopal railway station and a cluster of shantytowns surrounding the plant.


Somehow, water had entered the storage tank that contained anywhere from 11,000 to 13,000 gallons of MIC. A chemical reaction ensued, turning the MIC into gas.


The gas was vented through a safety valve to a scrubber that should have neutralized it as it escaped. But the intense heat and pressure generated by the gas overwhelmed the scrubber.

Another safety device, a flare tower designed to burn off escaping gas, might have helped even though it didn't have the capacity to handle the intense pressure, but it didn't because it had been dismantled for repairs.


Unchecked, the deadly gas swirled out of the tank and into the night.


By the time it was all over, more than 2,500 people had died and about 518,000 more were made ill, according to government figures. The gas leak at the Union Carbide plant was the worst industrial disaster in history.


Nearly two years later, S. P. Chaudhary, production manager at the Bhopal plant, stands at the plant's northern edge and surveys the weed-choked grounds.

"We had prize-winning landscaping here," he says, "the best roses, the lushest lawns. Now look at the waste."


In the distance looms an industrial complex of tanks, towers, pipes and sheds. "That's the MIC unit," he says, expressionlessly.


Other, more agonizing effects still linger. You can see them in the lines of people outside the numerous makeshift medical centers, in the anger of the workers idled by the disaster, on the expressionless faces of the victims, in the controversies surrounding the event and its aftermath.


As the Indian Airlines jet swoops low on its final descent into Bhopal, a big, beautiful lake comes into view. Ringed by lush green hills, it shimmers in the early morning sun. Bhopal is a city of 900,000 people crowded around the lake's northern, eastern and southern shores. It is the capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh, a stretch of Kipling country noted for its forests and wildlife, ravines and forts, princes and brigands.


Bhopal used to be the seat of a Muslim kingdom that was integrated into the union of states when India won its independence from British colonial rule in 1947. The city boasts imposing edifices from that regal past--a mosque that claims to be the largest in Asia, a palace and a huge, elaborately carved city gate--all rising from intricate lanes, crowded streets and tightly packed traditional row houses.


During the 1950s Bhopal, along with most of the state of Madhya Pradesh, was classified as an underdeveloped area and marked for special attention by the federal government in New Delhi. A huge "public-sector" enterprise (one owned and operated by the federal government) called Bharat Heavy Electricials Ltd. (BHEL) was set up near Bhopal. In nearby Jabalpur the government put up a major armaments factory.


In the 1960s the private sector was offered special inducements to locate manufacturing plants in the region. Attracted by the newly established industries, professionals came from all over India. Bhopal emerged as a major regional center, its population growing by 75 percent to about 500,000 between 1961 and 1971.


As the city prospered, arts and culture flourished. Recognizing the new importance of Bhopal, the federal government funded the construction of a complex to house art galleries, museums, theaters, a poetry center and a library. Called Bharat Bhavan, the complex is a low-slung building set around wide courtyards. It nestles on a hillside in the exclusive Shamla Hills section noted for its flower-bedecked gardens and panoramic views in the southern part of the city.


Union Carbide India Ltd. (UCIL) was one of a number of companies that took advantage of government inducements to set up shop in Bhopal. Among the incentives it received from the Madhya Pradesh state government was a long- term, low-cost lease on a plot of public land.


The UCIL plant is in the northeastern quadrant of the city. It was built in 1969 as a formulation factory for Union Carbide's Sevin brand of pesticides. A product popular with cotton and tobacco farmers, Sevin is an insecticide that kills pests by paralyzing their nervous systems.


"We began by importing Sevin Technical (a chemical concentrate) and formulating (diluting) it into the commercial product," says Chaudhary.


An articulate chemical engineer in his 40s, Chaudhary has been at the plant since it opened. He explains that Sevin Technical was a patented product made by reacting methyl isocyanate (MIC) and alpha-naphthol. The highly toxic concentrate was then diluted with other chemicals to make commercial Sevin for the agricultural market.


In 1973 Union Carbide Corp.'s management committee in the United States approved a capital expenditure of $20 million to expand operations at its Bhopal affiliate. As a first step, the Bhopal plant began to produce Sevin Technical, using imported MIC and alpha-naphthol.


Two years later the company began what Chaudhary called a "backward integration" of its operations. Instead of importing the ingredients needed to produce Sevin Technical, the goal was to manufacture them at the Bhopal site. In 1978 the company set up a unit to produce alpha-naphthol, and a year later the MIC unit was added.


The expansion at UCIL took place at a time when the Indian federal government's campaign to boost agricultural production began to bear fruit. Increased use of fertilizers and irrigation, the introduction of dry-farming techniques and hybrid crops, and a massive agricultural research and education program ushered in a "green revolution" that eventually transformed the country's agriculture.


By the end of the 1970s India achieved self-sufficiency in food production. This major agricultural success created new demands for a whole range of agricultural products, including pesticides.


With the added capacity, Union Carbide's Bhopal plant was then able to produce different pesticides for different segments of the expanding Indian market.


Underlying the increase in the size and scope of the plant was a corporate forecast that sales of its pesticide products would reach 5,000 tons a year by 1982. Sales peaked that year at 2,200 tons, an amount that fell considerably short of the projected figures.


At that production level the Bhopal plant worked at less than 50 percent of capacity, and by 1982 the plant began to lose money.


"Our projections were wrong," Chaudhary admits. It's not clear who made the calculations, but the parent company in Danbury put its imprimatur on the forecast in its 1978 annual report, noting that "pesticide use should grow steadily--particularly in the developing countries, where growth is forecast to be almost twice that in the United States."


Furthermore, while the Bhopal plant was increasing but underusing its capacity, many chemical manufacturers were producing new pesticides called synthetic pyrethroids that began to outsell MIC-based products on the world markets.


The Bhopal plant then took economy measures, laying off nearly half of its workforce of 1,300 and, among other steps, turned off, to save power costs, the refrigeration system that was supposed to keep within safe levels the temperature of the MIC in the plant's storage tanks.


The company's cost-cutting drive began to hurt morale at the plant. Many of its experienced supervisory workers left. At the shop-floor level, less- skilled workers from other units in the plant were transferred to the complex MIC unit. Workers complained to management about corroded pipes and other equipment-maintenance problems\


"We had to cut corners," says B. P. Srivastava, head of the Union Carbide research and development section in Bhopal.


On Christmas Eve, 1981, Ashraf Khan, a pipefitter in the factory's MIC unit, died of respiratory problems after he breathed fumes released by a spill of phosgene (the key ingredient in MIC). There had been other accidents before at the plant, but this was the first fatality, and for the first time people began to realize that the factory might be a public health hazard.


Opposition lawmakers raised the issue in the state assembly. Their clamor culminated in a 1983 motion that urged the state government to force the company to relocate to a less-populated area. But the government, which enjoyed a huge majority in the house, successfully resisted the demand.


"The factory is not a stone that can be picked up and moved wherever we please," the state labor minister, T. S. Viyogi, told the state assembly


The government was caught in a bind. It did not want to make the plant relocate to a safer location, and neither did it want to force the people living in the nearby shantytowns to move away from the plant area. In fact, the state government later in 1983 ceded tenancy rights to the residents of those shantytowns, which, long before the plant was built, had spread illegally on the government land surrounding it.


So the plant stayed, as did the people living around it. "Bhopal was a disaster waiting to happen," says N. K. Singh, a journalist who has followed the Bhopal disaster for India Today, one of that nation's leading news magazines.


On Dec. 2, 1984, the disaster struck. When the MIC gas, odorless and highly toxic, enveloped the shantytowns, people died in their sleep or dropped dead as they ran in terror on the streets. The people of Bhopal didn't know what hit them. "There was no community warning system," says production manager Chaudhary.


Among the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the gas leak were Syed Ashik Ali, 50, and his extended family. On the night of the disaster the 14 members of the family slept in a little hut in the Kazi Camp shantytown just south of the Union Carbide plant.


"I woke up in fright, choking and coughing. My chest was burning, my eyes began to water profusely," Ashik Ali recalls. Thinking that neighbors were "burning dry chilis," he went outside, he says, but saw nothing. "The burning in my chest had become intolerable, and my eyes had almost closed up," he adds. "So I sent one of my sons to the main road to investigate."


After what seemed like ages to Ashik Ali and when he was about ready, he says, to kill himself because of the pain, his son returned to tell of the panic in the streets. "People were running helter-skelter, shouting that some poisonous gas had leaked from the Union Carbide factory," the son remembers telling his family.


Not knowing what else to do, the family chose to huddle together in the hut. "I decided that we should all die together," Ashik Ali says.


Meanwhile, Fazlur Rahman, a brother-in-law with whom Ashik Ali shared the hut, had also ventured out. "When I heard that gas had leaked from the factory, I went to my friend Salim Ali, who used to work there. He told me to cover my face with a wet cloth," Rahman says.


When Rahman returned, he found members of the two families gathered together in the hut. Two of his daughters lay on the floor covered with sheets under which they had huddled in fright. "I thought they were dead," he says, pointing to his daughters Sabina and Sahana, now 11 and 10 respectively.


"The next morning my brother came with the bus that he drives for a living, loaded us all into it and drove us to the hospital," Rahman adds, recalling that most of the children in the family had passed out along with Ashik Ali.


Another survivor that night was Santosh Singh Thakur, 26, a worker at the Union Carbide canteen who lived in Chola, a shantytown east of the plant. "I covered by face with a wet cloth and ran to my house," he says.


He lived, but lost his job when the plant was closed down seven months after the disaster. Currently unemployed, Thakur does volunteer work at a medical center in his community. He feels that the state government bears the responsibility for the disaster because it allowed the company to set up the plant near a populated area.


Ashok Kumar Rana, 20, a graduate student at Bhopal University, was overcome by the gas. "My eyes remained closed for four days, and I still have difficulty breathing. I had to drop out of school because I couldn't concentrate on my books," he says. He had hoped to become a police inspector, but "the gas leak ruined everything." Rana also is a volunteer at the community health center in Chola.


Narbada Prasad, 35, was unemployed at the time of the disaster. He was returning from a friend's place when he heard about the leak. Rushing home, he found only his 6-year-old son. "I grabbed him and ran to the bus stop, hoping to get out of town. But the gas got to me by the time I reached the bus stop, and I fainted," he recalls with a shudder.


None of these survivors have total recall of that night. Their stories leave many questions unanswered, but they refuse to be pinned down to specifics. It was a night in which the raw instinct of survival prevailed over all other human demands.


"It was so bad that my neighbor abandoned her 7-month-old baby in a mad scramble to escape the pain," Fazlur Rahman says. "Likewise, many youths left their elderly parents behind."

"About 30 percent of those affected by the gas leak were children," says pediatrician Ashwini Syal of Bhopal's Hamidia Hospital. The hospital's pediatric ward normally admits 6,000 patients a year; in the days following the disaster the ward treated many times that number. "We were too busy coping to keep (complete) records," Syal adds.


Trying to explain the dimensions of the disaster, Syal falls back on his own experience. "As a medical doctor, I have seen people die, but this was awesome--almost a year's quota in a few days," he says.


Syal was called to the hospital in the early morning hours of Dec. 3. By then the initial trickle of victims seeking aid had become a flood. "They came in every conceivable mode of transport, and they kept coming in larger numbers," he recalls. The hospital was forced to call in 750 medical students along with doctors from other private hospitals in the area to handle the emergency.

Syal had learned from the attending physician in the emergency ward that the victims had been affected by a poisonous gas emanating from the Union Carbide plant. No more information was available.


"Initially, we examined the victims mainly to determine if they were dead or alive," he says, seated in the spartan doctor's lounge of the hospital's pediatric unit.


Syal and his colleagues found that most people suffered from burning eyes, breathing difficulties and hyperacidity. Working without information about MIC or its effects on humans, they could only treat the symptoms, not their underlying causes.


"We treated the victims with eye drops and bronchial dilators used on asthma patients. It was clear that even the Union Carbide people knew very little about MIC gas," he adds.


Meanwhile, a controversy developed over the treatment of victims. A Bhopal physician who conducted autopsies on the victims said he had found evidence of cyanide poisoning and recommended the use of sodium thiosulfate as an antidote. But Union Carbide disputed the doctor's findings, saying that MIC had no links with cyanide.


Citing the company's internal memos, critics later said that at high temperatures, MIC breaks down into hydrogen cyanide and challenged the company's rejection of the the cyanide-poisoning claims as an attempt to play down the toxic effects of MIC.


Dr. Yves Alarie, a toxicologist atthe University of Pittsburgh's Department of Industrial and Environmental Health Sciences and an expert on MIC and its toxic effects who has followed the Bhopal disaster, says that his tests showed no cyanide release in Bhopal. He notes that autopsy reports bore no record of the bitter-almond smell associated with cyanide. In any case, he adds, MIC gas is even more toxic than cyanide and by itself accounts for the fatalities and illnesses resulting from the leak.


Thanks largely to the efforts of people like Syal, the victims received the best care possible under the circumstances. In fact, many Western health experts later observed that they could not have done any better even if they had had more-advanced and better-organized facilities.


The medical response also included research studies on the long-term effects of MIC. One such study, funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), targeted infants born to victims who were pregnant at the time of the disaster. The goal was to see how these infants' mental and physical growth might have been affected by the gas leak.


The ICMR researchers surveyed a selected population of about 85,000 people, of whom 2,500 were pregnant women. The staff of 40 field workers visited the women monthly, and then weekly during the final month of their pregnancies. A thousand of these women were defined as "at risk" because they were in the early stages of pregnancy--20 weeks or less--when the gas leak occurred.


"In this group we found a significant increase in (spontaneous) abortions and stillbirths," says Syal, who is one of the researchers.


As a continuation of the project, researchers are now charting the growth of the "MIC-gas babies" every six months. "We find no evidence of congenital abnormalities," says Syal. "However, there's been a major increase in neurotic symptoms among these children--nightmares, sleeplessness, fatigue, lack of concentration, irritability and so on."


The ICMR study has focused attention on the children of India, where nearly 40 percent of the population is under age 15. In a culture that dismisses youth and reveres age, this segment of India's population is possibly the most neglected and oppressed.


Perhaps the most important aspect of the ICMR study is that it has made the country aware that its poor also have psychological needs. Indian mental- health professionals have an essentially middle-class bias. The assumption is that the poor are too busy keeping body and soul together to experience psychological problems.


For victims like Ashik Ali, whose income is less than $40 a month, the biggest concern is getting government relief payments. However, he has had to reckon with the state government bureaucracy, which is in charge of distributing relief funds from the federal government. Ashik Ali claims that he is entitled to an extra share of the $120-per-family government relief payment, arguing that there are really two families under his roof, his and that of his brother-in-law Fazlur Rahman. The bureaucracy did register the two families, but only Rahman has received the payment.


"I've talked to dozens of people. Everybody says they will do something, but so far nothing has happened," says Ashik Ali in a tired voice.


The relief payment is important to Ashik Ali, perhaps more for psychological than financial reasons, though the disaster showed how fragile his economic base was. Without medical help and the relief money, he and his family would have suffered even more.


The two families are hoping that there will be a settlement in their favor in a lawsuit against Union Carbide. Ashik Ali remembers being visited by an American lawyer accompanied by a local agent. He has a statement issued by the lawyer's U.S. firm and by Masand Mirza, a lawyer with the Bhopal Legal Action Center. The slip of paper registered him as a plaintiff in a class- action suit the American law firm said it would file against Union Carbide in the United States. It stipulated that the law firm would receive 33 percent of any settlement and would be reimbursed for all costs incurred. "The American told us we were entitled to damages of about $8, 000," Ashik Ali says.


But Ashik Ali is fast losing hope that he'll ever collect anything from that lawsuit. "That kind of money is beyond our wildest dreams," he says with an air of resignation. "However, the disaster awakened greed in me. In our lives, there's no room for greed. We have to share the little we have."


Fazlur Rahman, on the other hand, takes a hard-nosed view. "It's understandable that the (Madhya Pradesh state) government couldn't cope with the disaster," he says. "But since Union Carbide is an American company, what is the American government doing to make the company pay its dues? How would it have reacted if the same thing had happened in America?"


In addition to making relief payments, the Indian government has funded several rehabilitation projects to help families of workers who lost their means of livelihood in the disaster. One such project is located in a cluster of industrial sheds near the Jaiprakash Nagar shantytown east of the plant. Inside the sheds are rows and rows of women working at sewing machines. They are making clothes to be sold in local markets. The project is funded by the state's industries department.


The project's administrator is Ram Karan Yadav, 29, a mechanical engineer and the general secretary of the Union Carbide Karmachani Sangh (workers' union) who worked at the MIC unit in the Bhopal plant. He now works as a factory inspector for the state government.


When Union Carbide announced its decision to close the Bhopal plant after the disaster, Yadav emerged as a major spokesman for the union, leading protests that called upon the government to keep the plant open and challenging the company's decision in court. The court battle kept the plant technically open--and the workers on its payroll--for three more months.


When the state government finally allowed the plant to close in July, 1985, UCIL, after negotiations with Yadav and the union, gave each worker a lump sum of $800 as severance payment (about 6 months' pay).


Yadav today would like to see the government reopen the plant and use its facilities to manufacture a safe product.


Yadav is currently attempting to refute a claim by Union Carbide that the disaster of last December was a case of sabotage by a worker at the Bhopal plant. Last August the company released a statement that said: "Our investigations demonstrate that the tragedy was a deliberate act. Those investigations are now focusing on a specific individual employee of the Bhopal plant who was disgruntled and who had ample opportunity to inject the large amount of water into the (MIC) storage tank, which caused the massive gas release."


Union Carbide's charge is based on evidence drawn from the plant's daily notes, which were written by the supervisor of the MIC unit for the production manager. An entry on Nov. 27, five days before the disaster, shows that a worker was transferred from the MIC unit to the Sevin formulation unit. The company claims that this was, in effect, a demotion, and it contends that that individual was the disgruntled employee who entered the plant that night to perpetrate the sabotage. The motive, according to the company, was to get even with the supervisor for his demotion by spoiling a batch of chemicals. The statement adds that the disgruntled employee had no idea that his act would result in such a disaster.


Yadav disputes the company's findings. "I checked the notes myself," he says, "and there's no demotion mentioned. In fact, the company couldn't have demoted anyone without consulting the union." As for the company's position that the alleged saboteur didn't realize the full consequences of his action, Yadav says, "All MIC workers were college graduates and trained for their jobs."

But Union Carbide is standing by its charge of sabotage. Bud Holman, a New York lawyer representing the company, says that Union Carbide is convinced that the water that got into the MIC storage tank on the night of the disaster was deliberately put into the tank.


Yadav, on the other hand, claims that it would have been impossible for the alleged saboteur to do all the things that Union Carbide says he did from the time, at exactly 10:33, that he punched in for work that night until the time--about 11, Yadav claims; 11:30, according to most other accounts--that the gas leak was first discovered.


Examining the Union Carbide claim of sabotage, India Today last October was told by a Bhopal plant worker that the water pipe involved in the charge was half an inch in diameter and that it would have taken at least 45 minutes for the ton of water that entered the tank to pass through that pipe.


India Today also quoted a 1985 report by Union Carbide that said that the temperature of the MIC in storage tank No. 610 was between 15 and 20 degrees Celsius (59 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit) and noted, "The company's MIC manual says that at this temperature MIC would take at least 23 hours to react if water was added to it."


Union Carbide officials in Bhopal back up the company's charges. "There was no other way for water to enter the tank. We've eliminated the possibility that an operational mistake caused the gas leak. That leaves only sabotage," says production manager Choudhary.


Union Carbide has not named the suspect. But Yadav says the company will charge Mohan Lal Verma, a 28-year-old worker who was a trainee in the plant's MIC unit, as the saboteur.


Deep in the crowded old quarter of Bhopal, Mohan Lal Verma reclines on a bed in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers as he tells a visitor that he is not afraid of the charges that Union Carbide plans to make against him. "I have the support of the union as well as of the government," he says. His demeanor, however, is that of an obviously upset man. "I'm fed up with the whole thing," he says.


Verma joined UCIL in 1977 as an operator in the plant's alpha-naphthol unit. In November, 1982, when that unit was closed, Verma was reassigned as a trainee in the MIC unit, a much more sophisticated and complex operation where workers, depending on their experience, were paid more than the average wage of about $100 a month.


Verma, who held a postgraduate degree in mathematics (earned while he worked for Union Carbide in hopes of advancing to a managerial position), says the new assignment was a step forward. His training at the MIC unit was to have been completed in February, 1984, at which point he would have been classified as a "confirmed MIC plant operator." Instead, he remained a trainee until the disaster occurred in December, 1984.


Frustrated by the apparent lack of progress, Verma protested to his supervisor at the MIC unit. Eventually, he asked the union to take up his case. "It was sheer mental torture," he says.


Verma says he had heard rumors in the days before the disaster that he was to be transferred to the Sevin unit as punishment for his protest. "But I was never officially notified," he adds.


On the night of the disaster Verma punched in 12 minutes before the 10:45 start of the night shift. He then went to his locker, he says, changed into work clothes and reported for duty at the control room at the MIC unit. Verma claims he remained there until the gas leak was detected and that he left when the gas began to affect him.


Early on, Indian government investigators reported that water entered the tank when, during the earlier shift, a worker was ordered to wash out a pipe leading to the tank. Because the pipe, according to the investigators, had a faulty valve and thus was not properly sealed, water began to flow into the tank, contaminating the MIC inside and causing the runaway chemical reaction that led eventually to the massive gas release. The report adds that the supervisor who ordered the action was inexperienced and had arrived just two months before as a transferee from the company's Eveready battery division in Calcutta.

According to Holman, this "water-washing" theory of the Indian government was rejected by its own experts. He claims that the company has several witnesses who will testify that experiments conducted by government investigators, who traced the path of the water through the pipe, found that it could not have reached the tank that way.


"We remain convinced that water entered the tank when an employee removed the pressure indicator and hooked up the hose to the tank through the utility panel (on which the gauge was located). In fact, when another employee went to check on the source of the leak, he saw the hose with water running down its side and disconnected it. He then ran away, fearing that he would be implicated."


Union Carbide first raised the possibility of sabotage in March, 1985. At a press conference called to announce the findings of the company's initial investigation, Warren Anderson, the chairman of Union Carbide, rejected the Indian government's "water-washing" theory, saying that the company had not yet determined how the water entered the storage tank. He then told reporters that a disgruntled employee might have deliberately connected a water line to the tank.


Five months later, company lawyers submitted a clipping of a newspaper story to a U.S. federal judge who was conducting court hearings in New York. Based on a wire-service account, the story said that a group of Sikh extremists known as "Black June" had claimed responsibility for the Bhopal disaster. ("Black June" refers to June, 1984, when units of the Indian army entered the Sikhs' revered Golden Temple to flush out terrorists.)


According to India Today, the company had earlier tried to lay the responsibility on a Sikh employee, who had been dismissed along with several dozen other company officials after the leak. In doing so, India Today said, it had apparently forgotten that the man had stood surety, or bail, for Anderson when the company chairman traveled to Bhopal after the disaster and upon his arrival was placed under house arrest along with Bhopal managing director V. P. Gokhale and other senior UCIL officials. When the man threatened to withdraw the bail, the newsmagazine said, the company both withdrew the charge of sabotage and gave him a new position at its Luknow plant.


Many Indians see the company's claim of sabotage as a tactic to delay the court case against it. "The idea is to reduce liability," says Yadav.


Another, hotly contested issue centers on which Union Carbide unit should bear the legal responsibility for the gas leak. The parent company has maintained that its affiliate was to blame because its local executives had primary management responsibility for the plant.

The parent company, however, is the affiliate's single largest shareholder. Officials from its corporate headquarters in Danbury and from its Far East division (Union Carbide Eastern Inc.) held the majority on the Indian company's board. "All the major decisions were made in Danbury," says a Union Carbide India employee.


A similar assertion was made a few months after the disaster by Edward Munoz, a retired Union Carbide official who had served as chief executive of the Indian affiliate until 1976, when he returned to the U.S. to head the agricultural products division in Danbury.


Under Indian law, foreign companies can own no more than 40 percent equity in any Indian venture, but certain exceptions are made in the high- technology area. On this basis Union Carbide, as a high-technology company, was granted permission to retain an interest of nearly 51 percent in its Bhopal affiliate.


"Fifty-one-percent holding means you own the responsibility," says B. P. Srivastava, the Bhopal Company’s manager of research and development.


Meanwhile, the parent company continues to distance itself from its afflicted Indian affiliate. "Being the largest stockholder didn't mean anything," says Holman. "The company needed government approval for everything. The affiliate had Indian employees and Indian managers. Even the Indian government recognized it as a separate company, distinct from Union Carbide Corp."


The parent company's attempts to let its affiliate shoulder the blame for the disaster have affected its local employees. Pushed to comment on the subject, the company's Srivastava says, "It offends my pride as an Indian." Another senior manager with line responsibility in Bhopal says, "I understand the need to assess blame, but it does hurt."


Last Sept. 5 the Indian government filed for damages against Union Carbide Corp. in the Bhopal district court. At that time Indian news agencies reported that Union Carbide "failed to appear at the hearing."


Holman explains that the company was not properly served with a summons for that hearing. "We received the summons only in mid-October because it was sent to the company at its old address at 270 Park Ave., in New York City. Everyone knows that Union Carbide has been in Danbury, Conn., for years," Holman says. Union Carbide then appeared in court Oct. 30.


The damage suit was initially brought before a federal court in New York, which agreed with the company's argument that India was the proper forum for the case. But in transferring the case, Judge John F. Keenan ruled that the American-based parent company, not just its Indian affiliate, could also be held accountable by the Indian court.


The judge also ruled that the company must submit to U.S. federal pretrial discovery procedures in India. Union Carbide has appealed that ruling, contending that it, too, should be entitled to subject the Indian government as plaintiff to the the same U.S.-style discovery procedures in India. The move was promptly challenged by the Indian government.


In a "cross appeal," the Indian government said that under Keenan's ruling, the company got what it wanted--to transfer the case to Indian jurisdiction.


"If Union Carbide was more concerned with gaining discovery under U.S. federal rules, it could have chosen to remain in the United States, where there was no question of the general applicability of the (U.S.) federal rules to all parties," the government's brief noted. A ruling on the Union Carbide appeal has been scheduled for late November.


Meanwhile, the Bhopal court has refused to hear the suit filed by American lawyers on behalf of individual victims whom they had signed up as parties to a class-action suit against Union Carbide. These lawyers had sought a "fairness hearing," presumably to ask the Indian court to accept a $350-million settlement offered to them by Union Carbide in March of this year. But the Indian government has already successfully argued before Judge Keenan in New York that any settlement would be invalid without its participation. The Indian government, under legislation enacted by parliament after the disaster, has claimed for itself the sole right to represent the 518,000 victims of the gas leak.

While all the legal bickering goes on, R&D manager B. P. Srivastava worries about the fate of the plush Union Carbide research center in Bhopal's Shamla Hills section. "It's the only one of its kind in the country," he says. He thinks that the government might convert it to a national laboratory because of the fundamental work it does in the field of pesticides.


"We are involved in the discovery of new chemicals and the development of manufacturing processes for chemicals that are currently imported," he says. Srivastava would dearly like to see the Indian government and Union Carbide resolve their differences. "The disaster has demoralized my staff. As a result, scientific work here is suffering," he adds.


Across town, in a residential project built by the Madhya Pradesh state housing authority, union leader Yadav nurtures an ambition to run for a seat in the state assembly. "The Bhopal disaster gave me the opportunity to step out into public life, and I hope to run for public office as an independent," he says.


Already sounding like a candidate, Yadav says that Union Carbide's "demonstrated lack of compassion will hurt the interests of other American multinational firms in India. We were the company's edge in competitive world markets. In trying to pin the blame on us, the company is cutting off its nose to spite its face."


In New Delhi, Shiv Visvanathan, a social scientist at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, feels that the gas-leak disaster in Bhopal is a ringing indictment of development priorities in Third World countries, which are dominated by a predilection for imported technology without the concomitant infrastructure to assess and manage such technologies.


"When the gas leak occurred two years ago in Bhopal, the government did not have the will or the wherewithal to deal with the tragedy," Visvanathan says. "As a result, it did what it knew best. It bureaucratized the catastrophe into reports, certificates, files and serial numbers. Thus, the disaster, which appeared apocalyptic to the people of Bhopal, was spread over a conceptual assembly line and broken down into a series of routine and humdrum acts," he adds.


From Basheer Khan, 26, a Bhopal taxi driver, comes perhaps the most pragmatic assessment of the disaster. "True, the gas leak was a tragedy," he says. "But it also had a silver lining for people like me and for the local hotel industry. We've had more foreigners come here in the past two years than at any other time that I can remember."


Steering his cab skilfully through Bhopal's narrow streets, he adds, "Things haven't changed much since the gas leak; people have gone back to living their own lives. In India, we have learned to take disaster in stride."




Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010

Saturday, November 27, 2010

American Life 7

The Media Wedding

N 42° 19.241 W 071° 03.438.

Those are the GPS co-ordinates of the Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta Church in Boston’s historic Dorchester district, a working class neighborhood which the locals call “Dot.” Thing about Dot is that is this is the district where Boston Police have paid special attention with a view to combating crime. Among other initiatives, they have implemented a project called CAT, combating auto theft. Dot is not exactly on the tourist map but the church is lovely, well worth a visit. It has the first sculpture I’ve ever seen of Mother Theresa.

We were at the church on November 6 to celebrate the wedding of my favorite guy, my nephew Nikhil, a member of the Pereira family into which I married many years ago. The reason why the ceremony was held there, I think, is because Mother Theresa visited the Pereira home in Ahmedabad, India in 1983, when I was a mere child of a few…never mind! Just let’s say I was younger then than the groom, in his wedding regalia in 2010.

At that hallowed venue, Nikhil pledged his troth to Jillian, whose Sherlock family is like the Pereiras, large and fun loving. Slightly hung over from the party the previous evening, we filed into the church and took our appointed places. As the ceremony proceeded, I couldn’t help but marvel at the idea of a Goan-Irish wedding. Nikhil is Goan and Jillian comes from strong Irish stock. And it clicked as it did naturally; Goa stands in the same relationship to India as Ireland does to mainland Britain: similar culture, different lifestyles.

India usurped Goa from the Portuguese in 1961 without much fuss; Britain could only hold the northern part of Ireland and still faces problems. But the Sherlocks are from the Jersey shore; they’re as American as apple pie. Our family, which includes my wife, the sister of Nikhil’s dad, and our daughters, well-known fun lovers, certainly understands how to melt into the American pot. We lived in Chicago, where the Irish have held sway for decades; we even dye our river green, drink green beer and march in an embarassing parade on St Paddy’s Day.

So there we were at the church, absorbed in the solemn ceremony that affirmed the Nik and Jill union. There was no choir but a priest, who sang in the voice divine. (Didn’t get your name, reverend, but if you ever give up your day job, you could be on the opera circuit.) It was all too beautiful, as the anthem to getting high sang in the sixties. Mind you, nobody, as far I could tell, had done spliffs; but then what do I know!

Not to digress …so the ceremony came to an end and I walked out the church door, there to be confronted by a battery of television crews, still photographers, reporters, cops and a general array of bystanders.

“Huh!” I said to myself. “I never notified the media. But how cool is this!” For the record, I run a public relations business and write columns for newspapers and magazines and Res Gestae, my blog, from whence this comes to you.

Anyway, so there I was, confronted by all the television cameras and what have you. My first instinct, honed from years in the media business, was to go up to them and say, “At this time, we have no comment.”

Actually, I didn’t say that because I had no idea what was going on until someone told me that a crazed psycho, brandishing a gun, had hijacked the bridesmaids’ limo. (So much for the Boston Police’s anti-auto theft program CAT.) For all my training as a journalist and my standing as veteran public relations professional, all I could say was: “Say what? Really, really, really?” So much for smooth articulation!

Crisis communications is for what I charge clients substantial sums of money; I train them to respond with gravitas and assuredness. And “Say what? Really, really, really?” is not among the responses I recommend. Also not “Jeez!” Or “What the **ck!” (That’s “heck.” Don’t want this piece to be “Banned in Boston.”)

The wedding made all the channels on the evening news and featured in all the major newspapers in Boston the next day; it even made the Daily Mail in London and, I’m told, the Guatemala media. I googled it to see if my smooth and suave response was quoted; mercifully the media had not picked up on my insightful comments.

“Phew!”


Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010


Saturday, November 20, 2010

American Life 6

All in the Family

Her email was cryptic. “We are going to bring in my sister's birthday at the Hearth restaurant in the East Village on November 2 and then observe the occasion on November 3 at En Japanese Brasserie in the West Village,” my younger daughter wrote. We read her message as we packed our bags to take an ungodly hour flight to New York from Delhi.

Our older daughter's birthday was a seminal rite of passage and her younger sister had chosen the restaurants with care. Our entire family including two daughters, our son-in-law, my wife and I were in the city in a rare togetherness. Several of my daughters’ friends also joined the party; to say the very least, the two events were hugely fun.

The Hearth is a special place because its executive chef Marco Canora describes the offering as “food rooted in the modern American kitchen with influences of our Italian heritage.” A celebrated chef, who has appeared on major television shows, Canora offers an “unpretentious, seasonally inspired” menu, not to mention a dry Martini that elevates the soul. All his ingredients are sourced from within a 150 miles of the city, from upstate New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

My veal was from Lebanon County, the heart of Pennsylvania’s Dutch region; it was “vegetarian fed with no hormones, no antibiotics and no animal products.” Best of all, it tasted great: mellow, creamy and delicately flavorful. Washed down with a red wine from nearby Long Island, it made for a perfect meal. What a super way to bring in a seminal birthday. It is a measure of the contwixted ties between India and America that our family celebration was in New City’s fabulous Lower East Side. Both countries are intimately bound by family ties that soar above diplomacy and geopolitics.

After dinner, we parted as the young people chose to hit the bars that light up the Lower East Side; my wife and I repaired to a quiet restaurant to listen to live Jazz over an after dinner drink. And we both left the thing unsaid, how fortunate to have a family celebration in the city that never sleeps. “I’m glad be part of it, New York, New York,” the edited refrain from the famous song kept buzzing in my head.

Next day at the Japanese brasserie was just as much fun. The restaurant features comfort food served in “Izakayas,” neighborhood pubs. But En is hardly a local diner. Housed in what was once an industrial warehouse, it a huge cavernous place where Japanese chefs have elevated simple food into a Michelin type dining experience.

Not being a huge fan of Japanese food, I sought safety in the crispy friend chicken that was totally excellent but my younger brat dissed on my “Kentucky fried chicken” and insisted I taste her pork belly dish; others plied me with helpings from the clay rice pot with salmon roe. OMG, I said to my daughters and the young people assembled there, this is fab, using my sixties idiom as a counter to their 21st century texting language.

And so we ate and talked and drank sake into the wee hours (11 pm not 3 am). For dessert, we shared some sort of an ice cream and also a cheesecake that I relished until I realized it was tofu and was forced to take a huge gulp from Siddharth's sake shot. My wife looked at me; she didn’t have to say a word for me to know she was saying, “Any excuse for booze!” But it’s Japanese, I told her, “That’s got to count for something!”

As we walked back to our hotel, my mind strayed to my seminal birthday many years ago. We had just closed on a condo in a 100-year-old building in Oak Park, a suburb that abuts Chicago’s West Side. It was indeed a happy birthday for me as we had dinner with friends and talked excitedly of our new home. A year later, our first daughter was born and the joy was unbounded. In New York on November 3 2010, our pleasure stretched from sea to shining sea. To be together as a family in the southern tip of Manhattan is a happiness that soars as high as the Empire State Building.

How lucky can you get!


Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

On the Need for Citizenship Education


When our older daughter began to attend elementary school in the United States, I was struck by two things: first, the school day for all students began, hand over heart, with the Pledge of Allegiance, which was effectively a solemn declaration of loyalty to the republic. Second, on the very first day, the teacher taught them “the golden rules:” think before you speak and treat others the same way in which you would expect them to treat you.

Thus, the first lesson learned in the school was a civic one: respect for the constitution and a rule-based way of dealing with fellow citizens of the republic. In fact, the American community-led public education system started out as a citizenship training program; the idea was to enable and empower citizens in the discharge of their civic obligations and in their quest for economic opportunity. It was a simple idea that drove elementary public education in America: an informed citizenry, compliant with the laws, is the best guarantor of liberty and justice.

Some years later, I was dropping my daughters off at one of Delhi’s better schools to which they had been admitted after we moved from the US. The picture couldn’t have been more radically different. First, it was a school for girls only; students wore a hideous uniform and the ambience was chaotic, with girls running around, pushing and shoving, unmindful of the safety or convenience of others. Later, we discovered that it was a tyrannical place, subject to the Victorian whims of the nuns who ran it.

Our daughters were traumatized; on the academic front as well the school was a zero. The curriculum as dictated by the Central Board of Secondary Education and the National Council of Education Research and Training was lame. The faculty did very little but race through a rote method of teaching; it was clear our daughters were not learning much and that added to their misery. We withdrew them from the school to the disbelief of many; the school was among the most sought after in the city.

Far from teaching students the virtues of citizenship, all that the school did was to prepare their students to take board examinations in which only very high scores can ensure admission to an even more dysfunctional university system. The psychological costs that students have to pay are never addressed, simply dismissed by teachers and parents alike as collateral damage in the race to succeed at examinations. We pulled them out of the twisted system and enrolled them in an international school, where they blossomed.

In the current debates over education policy, the focus has centered on reforms at every level: elementary schools, institutes of higher education, vocational training. Issues of private ownership versus government control, entry of global education providers, certification and accreditation are among others that have been raised. What seems to have been missed completely is the civic aspects of education. Respect for your neighborhood, your city, your state, your country needs to be instilled at a very early age without crossing the line to become chauvinism.

Sadly, most political parties, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party, have fallen into the trap of jingoism. The Congress, for its part, has a version; let's call it patriotism in which there is still a chip on the shoulder that prevents a realistic assessment of the Indian situation. Chest thumping or moaning and groaning about “inclusive growth” is hardly the way to instill civic values in the citizenry. The so-called “youth dividend” can only succeed if the education system instills a sense of civic values in the populace, beginning right from primary school.

The proposition is not that difficult to grasp. Civic authorites cannot prevent people from urinating, defecating or spitting paan on the streets; they cannot keep people from driving like lunatics, blowing their horns or jumping a line or being smelly because they have never heard about deodorants. But they can teach their children to respect public spaces.

In Delhi, for example, the Metro is a big hit as are the new low-floor sleek buses; new flyovers, expressways and underpasses, even parks and landscaped streets and slick new bus stops. In the next decade, a whole generation will grow up used to these public goods. What schools need to teach them is how to use these and not be vandals.

Amazingly, none of this is part of the academic agenda. On the right, people talk about India shining with its economic growth. On the left, people talk about hunger, poverty and disease. Smack dab in the middle, we need to teach young people, increasingly more exposed to the world through the Internet, television, and mobile phones, that the default position in India need not be a poverty, filth and disease. That in fact India with its new and shiny economy could be an example of a new 21st century civic culture in which an egalitarian and efficient ethic prevails.

Instead of moaning on about its ancient culture or the glaring disparities in its society, India should showcase itself as the new shining country that can in the words of the 1960s anthem: “change the world, rearrange the world.” That dream of the sixties that was held out tantalizingly in the West can come true in the world’s largest democracy and its second fastest growing economy.

An edited version of this article appeared in Education World, November 2010.




Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Citizenship education lacuna

When our older daughter began to attend elementary school in the United States, I was struck by the fact that the school day for all students began, hand over heart, with the Pledge of Allegiance, which was effectively a solemn declaration of loyalty to the republic. Secondly, on the very first day, the teacher taught them ‘the golden rules’: think before you speak, and treat others the same way as you would expect them to treat you.
Thus, the first lesson learned in school was a civic one: respect for the Constitution and a rule-based way of transacting with fellow citizens of the republic. In fact, the American community-led public education system started out as a citizenship training programme. The objective was to enable and empower citizens in the discharge of their civic obligations and in their quest for economic opportunity. It was a simple idea that drove elementary public education in America: an informed citizenry, compliant with the law is the best guarantor of liberty and justice.
Some years later, I was dropping my daughters off at one of Delhi’s better schools into which they had been adm-itted after we moved from the US. The picture couldn’t have been more radically different. First, it was an all-girls school. Students wore a hideous uniform and the ambience was chaotic, with girls running around, push-ing and shoving, unmindful of the safety or convenience of others. Later, we discov-ered that it was a tyrannical institution, subject to the whims of Victorian nuns who ran it.
Our daughters were traumatised because on the academic front as well, the school was a zero. The curriculum prescribed by the Central Board of Secondary Education and the National Council of Educational Research and Training was lame. The faculty did very little except race through a rote method of teaching; it was clear our daughters were not learning much and that added to their misery. We withdrew them from the school to the disbelief of many, as the school was among the most sought-after in the city.
Far from teaching students the virtues of citizenship, all that the school did was to prepare them to write board examinations to attain high scores, which ensured admission into an even more dysfunctional university system. The psychological costs that students have to pay are never addressed — simply dismissed by teachers and parents alike as collateral damage in the race to succeed in examinations. We pulled them out of this twisted system and enroled them in an international school, where they blossomed.
In the current debates over education policy, the focus has centred on reform at every level: elementary schools, institutes of higher education, vocational training. Issues of private ownership versus govern-ment control, entry of global education providers, certification and accreditation are routinely raised. What seems to have been missed completely is the civic aspects of education. Respect for the neighbourhood, city, state and country needs to be instilled at a very early age without crossing the line into chauvinism.
Sadly, most political parties, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party, have fallen into the trap of jingoism. The Congress, for its part, has a version; let’s call it patriotism in which there’s still a chip on the shoulder which prevents a realistic assessment of the Indian situation. Chest thumping or moaning and groaning about “inclusive growth” is hardly the way to instill civic values in the citizenry. The so-called ‘youth dividend’ can only be banked if the education system instills a sense of civic conscious-ness in the populace, beginning right from primary school.
The proposition is not so difficult to grasp. Civic authorities cannot prevent people from urinating, or spitting paan in the streets; from driving like lunatics, blowing car horns or jumping queues or being malodorous because they have never heard of deodorants. But schools can teach their children to respect public spaces. In Delhi, for example, the Metro is a big hit as are the new low-floor sleek buses, flyovers, expressways and underpasses, parks and landscaped streets. In the next decade, a whole generation will grow up using these public goods. What schools need to teach students is how to use these facilities respectfully.
Amazingly, none of this is part of the academic agenda. On the right, people talk about India shining with its economic growth. On the left, people talk about hunger, poverty and disease. Smack dab in the middle, we need to teach young people, increasingly more exposed to the wider world through the internet, television, and mobile phones, that the default position in India need not be poverty, filth and disease. That in fact India with its red-hot economy, could become a byword for a progressive civic culture in which egalitarianism and efficiency prevail.
Instead of going on about our ancient culture or the glaring disparities in society, India should showcase itself as the proud new country that can in the words of the 1960s anthem: “change the world, rearrange the world”. That dream of the 60s that was held out tantalisingly in the West can come true in the world’s largest democracy and second fastest growing economy.

(An edited version of this post will appear in http://www.educationworld.in, November 6, 2010.)

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Despite bins, Delhiites can’t keep their stadium clean

Hindustan Times

October 7, 2010

Page 3, New Delhi


They came, they ate, they littered and they left.

Several spectators who came to the 102-acre Indira Gandhi stadium to watch wrestling, cycling and gymnastics treated the stadium as a big, open dustbin and threw around cola bottles, burger wraps and poly-bags wherever they could find space.

They chose to ignore the dustbins that were placed at every five metres.

Some people even trampled on the grass within the showpiece tree guards. The sanitation staff was seen cleaning the mess every half an hour.

"We are not allowed to take any kind of food items and water bottles inside the competition venue. I have children with me, so they cannot sit empty stomach till the events are over. We decided to buy food from the counter and eat here," said Ramesh Kumar, who had come from Rohini with his family of seven.

When asked why they were littering the area when there were plenty of dustbins around and one right next to him, Kumar said, "Well, there are people around who have been hired to clean this place, it's not a big deal."

A sanitation staff deployed at the stadium complained that despite dustbins being placed, the people chose to throw the waste around.

"We work here in eight hour shifts. Every half an hour we have to collect the garbage that is all over the stadium. The dustbins are almost empty," said Harish Kumar, a sanitations staff of Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD).

The Fast Trax counters that sold food and beverages saw huge queues as people grabbed knick-knacks before they entered the competition areas.

A day after the opening ceremony at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, the MCD had collected 20,000 kg garbage that was generated in eight hours.


The authorities have place 500 bins all over the stadium.

Friday, August 27, 2010

From the 6th Anniversary Issue of Impact , August 2010



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Thursday, July 15, 2010

Goan Journal

The Monsoon Magnificence



You’ve got to be a hardy soul to come to Goa in the Monsoon. It rains incessantly and does drumbeats on the roof; the percussion is as good as anything Max Roach did, especially on his album, Money Jungle, with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. Still, as Credence Clearwater Revival sang, the rain keeps falling. And I don’t really wonder, amid the sophisticated Roach-style beat of the rain on my roof, who’ll stop the rain.


Goa in the rains is a sight for sore eyes and a balm for troubled minds. It has a calming effect: nothing really matters, except the drain of stress. We start from the chaotic airport. You can deal with it because in minutes you can get in the car and leave India behind. Goa is our foreign destination where people are civilized, traffic is orderly and everyone looks out for others. The skies open up with huge rainfall and all you want to do is stop the car, jump out and let yourself be drenched in the Monsoon rains.


We arrived in Goa on an afternoon in July and later that evening drove to Chicalim in the north to celebrate a friend’s birthday. His place is approximately in the middle of nowhere. I may be wrong but even the Portuguese didn’t venture there. And so we’re in our car, negotiating the twist and turns to get there. Once we reach his people-friendly house with its inviting “come, hang out” charm, we forget the world. The only bummer was Germany destroyed Argentina in South Africa; the South Americans were the team I picked to win the Cup.


Goa in the rains is a magical mystery tour. Green is the operative color; moss is your ground cover and the world stands still. Here, you add years to your life. Time is stretched out. Read a book, listen to music, and drench yourself in the rain: you can do stuff you wish you could do in the stressed out reality of India.


In the rain-lashed season, Goa can also be an adventure. There are few places open for lunch or dinner; all the beach shacks are closed; in fact, even the beaches are run over by the sea. You have to be resourceful and find spots that are open. You may have to travel a fair distance or experiment with all manner of local places. But the best thing is to eat at home and then find a rock on a beach, sit on it and watch the thunderous majesty of the sea in the rains.


We’ve had a place here since the turn of the century. More important, this is my sasural; my wife’s family is from Goa and our place is just 15 minutes away from her family home. Also, we have other family here in Chicalim and Aldona and good friends in Panjim, Anjuna and Colvale. For us, this emerald haven is not a vacation spot; it is our second home. We feel we belong here.


Plus Goa is full of random surprises. At dinner one evening at a local diner, a bunch of people showed up. There was this handsome guy sitting in a chair right next to me. He pulled out a bottle of scotch and offered to share it. We demurred but he was insistent. So we had a drink from his bottle. He said his name was Kumar Gaurav, son of the famous Bollywood tragedy king, Rajendra Kumar. He said he was married to Namrata Dutt, daughter of Sunil Dutt and Nargis. As such he is the brother-in-law of Priya Dutt, the Congress MP and Sanjay Dutt, the actor of Munnabhai fame.


We struck up a conversation in this diner called Starlight and he was insistent to take us to his house in Parra, a suburb of Mapuca. It turned out to be a gorgeous place, slick and breathing of wealth. He showed us around and when we left after 15 minutes, we drove away impressed. In the end, we marvelled that something like this could happen in such an impromptu fashion. But that’s Goa for you. You meet some guy in a restaurant or in a market or a grocery store and you become friends.


That’s the social part of Goa. And it’s wonderful. What is equally spectacular is the majesty of nature here, especially in the Monsoon. As I sit in my verandah, surrounded by a cathedral of coconut trees and watch and hear the rain falling, I am struck by the bounty of nature. As the rain stops, the garden is awash with fireflies everywhere, lighting up, for a brief moment, the darkness of the clouds.


My friend Aasif, an architect, who lives here, having come from 30-plus years in London, tells me that the glow in the fireflies is about sex. “It’s their penis that lights up with a view to attract to females,” he says. He also added that fireflies are rapidly becoming extinct with growing urbanization. Because of city lights, their glow doesn’t show and they cannot mate.


Aasif can identify bird calls, butterflies and constellations in the sky. He lived for 30 years a busy life in London but now he is a connoisseur of Nature. What a wonderful way to spend the rest of your life.


So you live and you learn. When all’s said and done, you can be alone in Goa in the rains and have the soothing and disturbing sounds of the falling water to keep you company. Soothing because it lulls; disturbing because in a 250-year-old house, you never know where water will drip. You simply feel at the mercy of nature. So we look at the bounteous aspect: green, blue and grey.


We all know from the news media that Goan politics is all about rent money; corruption is rampant and crime starts in the cabinet. And so it is everywhere else in India. In Goa, though, our local primary health care center has doctors, nurses, ambulances, medicines and diagnostic equipment. The schools have teachers; the roads are well paved and the traffic is orderly.


Sometimes, I think we should just move here and be done with the chaos of the rest of India.



Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010

Monday, June 21, 2010

American Life 5

Washington DC: A New Home

The five-day-long party that was DC began in New York City’s West Village on a Saturday afternoon. My daughter and I stood outside a café, waiting for our friends Gautam and Rita and their daughter Brinda and her husband Peter. Suddenly, amid the general noise of revelry that envelops this oh-so-cool segment of Manhattan, I heard someone call my name in the distance. I looked around because my name is not a common one in these parts. And there across the street, I saw Gautam waving at me.

We crossed the street to join them and to begin what turned out to be five rollicking and fulfilling days. Gautam has served as the senior most editor in The Times of India and is the founding editor of Bombay’s newest daily, DNA. Above all, he is a rock star whose rendition of Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog can get even a lead-footed person to do gyrations on the dance floor. In his days in India, he was a regular at our house; all our friends took to him and he became part of our family.

So there we were on the brink of a raucous evening in Manhattan. We went to a blues bar and ate dinner in a French bistro before traipsing home with a song let out of our heart. It was a memorable evening, even if we had too much wine. When good friends get together in a happening place like the West Village, you can be sure it will be a highlight (dare I be unsubtle and say: yes there were lights and yes we were high).

So after an evening in the Village, Sunday morning we hit I-95 en route to Washington DC. For all the 229 miles of the way, I luxuriated in the company of Gautam and Rita. I was excited to be going to DC after too many years. The plan was to arrive at their place in Chevy Chase in the early afternoon and then head out to the home of their friends for dinner and singsong with guitars. These are friends whom we’d met last summer at the wedding in Vermont where Brinda and Peter took their vows in a gorgeous farm in Vermont.

Can people talk to each other for five straight days and never once be bored? With Gautam and Rita, it’s not only easy but enjoyable. We talked about the whole world, about rock’n roll, The Beatles, Indo-US relations, and what have you. The most amazing thing about being with them is you can talk about foreign policy, international relations, and world economics but also about music, going back to the good old days of Hindi film music and classic rock.

A friend christened Rita “chopdi (book) aunty,” given her voluminous knowledge of just about everything under the sun, starting from education to Bollywood. You want to know about the latest issues on education? About the lives of Bollywood stars? About the story behind the Oscar awards? About the buzz in DC, New York, Boston, Bombay or Delhi? Rita’s got it all down pat. She is the source: wire service, book of quotations, thesaurus and encyclopedia, all rolled into one. What she doesn’t know is not worth knowing.

Coming into Washington after a long gap was an immensely interesting prospect for a public affairs junkie like me. This is the capital of the world, where leaders from all nations come to get things done. It’s also the first time I came to DC where Martin Luther King’s dream had come true in the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Obama is from my hometown, Chicago.

As we drove around the city, I was struck by the small-town beauty of the place. There were flowers everywhere and people were dressed in their spring best: linens and cottons. To read the newspapers and to watch television, you’d expect a sense of doom and gloom. I saw none of it. The cafés were full; restaurants were abuzz and people were walking about with a spring in their step.

“There’s John Podesta,” said Gautam as we drove around the downtown area, close to the White House. He was crossing the street. Podesta, another Chicago boy, served as White House Chief of Staff for three years under Bill Clinton. As you drive around the stressful streets of Delhi, you are not likely to see any person of any consequence, surrounded as they are by security and minions. And walking? What a contrast!

There is an understated elegance about Washington. The city seems to know it is the center of the world. It doesn’t have to pretend. Economic upturns and dips have little impact on it. Everyone seems to be confident about their jobs and income. True, there are neighborhoods in the city where America’s recession-hit economy is playing havoc. But to walk the streets, you feel the sense of power and stability.

While it seems not to have the buzz of New York or the vitality of Chicago or the laid back sophistication of San Francisco or the in-your-face character of Los Angeles, Washington stands for stability. It reminded me Kipling’s poem If:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,

In the middle of the storm of terrorism, financial malfeasance and natural and other disasters, Washington is the focal point of stability-seeking billions in the world. Yes, there’s Iraq and Afghanistan, the oil spill and Katrina, bailouts and joblessness. But if we didn’t have Washington, we would have to invent it.

We need Washington. In this capital, a click of computer keys can change the fate of global business; can challenge ruthless dictators; can hold multinationals accountable; can take on terrorism; can boost the world economy. All the misbegotten activists, who blame Washington for all the ills in the world, should know there are institutions in this city that successfully fight against child labor, dowry deaths, communicable diseases, sweatshops, hunger and poverty.

I spent most of the week in Washington, meeting friends in government, lobbying firms and multilateral organizations. What struck me was that in the interim, I came away more informed about global issues and to understand that the power people in Washington are as skeptical of multinational firms as the activists, who make a fetish of being anti-American.

Another revelation was that India is not a hot button in the media or public debate. The only people who seem to care about our benighted country are the people in the White House, the State Department and the Defense Department; also people in the arts and culture, which is not a bad list. But in the general milieu, India may as well be the Central African Republic. India has to struggle to get noticed. Since George W Bush, it has been helped along by these various arms of the US government.

In the end, the nicest thing about my visit to the capital was to know that it is one more city I can call my home. There’s Chicago, of course; New York City, where my daughter holds sway; Boston, the home of my favorite nephew. But now there’s Washington, where Gautam, my soul mate, enjoys his life.



Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010

Monday, June 14, 2010

American Life 4

Chicago, My Kind of Town

On a bright beautiful spring morning, I landed in Chicago, where I have a family of friends. The airport, the city, the drive to River Forest is full of fond memories. This is the town that I’ve come back to, over and over again. It’s just gotten better and better. What more can I say: I love Chicago.

As I lug my bag across the street and wait in the vestibule for my friend Prakash to pick me up, I wonder about my past life in this city of broad shoulders. Usually, it was my wife and two excited kids, who would welcome me back from wherever. “Love ya, Dad,” my daughters would trill as I kissed my wife. What a warm comforting feeling it was!

In the event, Prakash pulls up to the sidewalk and gives me a hug. I am back home, I think to myself as I snap the seatbelt on, en route the familiar way to the Oak Park-River Forest area, where we lived. As we drive to Prakash’s house in River Forest, I look out the window and go into a reverie of my happy days in Chicago.

It’s my town, the toddlin’ town; I ask myself: why did you ever leave here? The existential question was in my mind as we drove through the familiar streets. What I looked forward to was a wonderful week with friends and the sheer joy of being there. This is the city where I got my first job, bought my first house; where my daughters were born. I lived here in the heady days, when my fellow columnist in the Chicago Tribune newspaper invented the word “yuppie.” It is the city of jazz and blues but also the Chicago Symphony, one of the finest orchestras in the world.

Chicago is where I grew up and learned the lesson of self sustenance. It wasn’t easy but the city permeated me with a sense of optimism: tomorrow will always be better than today. You can do anything, do what you want: that was the city’s ethic. And it has become better and better, leaving me breathless with wonder. This is a city that has transformed itself from the Rust Belt blues into a shining example of urban renewal. On hindsight, it seems to be obvious that Chicago would throw up a Barack Obama.

The reveries came to an end as Prakash pulled into his driveway. We got my bag out and I settled myself into the bedroom that his wife Alice reserves for me. Then I came down and waited over a beer for our fiends to show for the traditional pizza party when I arrive.

We had the pizzas and the beer and talked late into the night. My family of friends was keen to know about India and its ways. They wanted to talk to me about politics, the economy and every other aspect of India; they had many questions. For my part, I was just grateful to be there in the city that I love and the friends whom I miss fiercely.

Clearly though, there was no escaping the questions. I had to answer. But my message was clear: I’m here to escape from the loud ineptitude of India. Nevertheless, development issues like jobs, equity, education and health care are important to my friends. This goes back many decades to the 1970s when we had formed India Forum to discuss and debate the issues.

Among the members of India Forum in Chicago was Satu “Sam” Pitroda, in whose office we held our Sunday morning meetings. In the early 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi appeared on the scene; many of us, including Sam, moved to India in the hope of changing things. What we did not reckon for was the strange ways of politicians and the slimy ways of bureaucracy. They opposed us tooth and nail. Our optimism was singed by the relentless cynicism of the bureaucracy and the political establishment.

In the end though, we succeeded beyond our wildest imagination. From being a basket case, India is now regarded as an engine of global growth. We have “development” in India now but it is subverted into mediocrity by the knot of ignorant politicians and venal bureaucrats. The Indian system is simply unable to deal with growth and the concomitant demands for fairness and transparency.

That evening in Chicago over pizza and beer, old friends met and talked about the issues. As the evening wore on and I was steeped in being there; it was almost as if I had never left. Dreamy as I was, I felt it was late and I had to go home. Our house was barely a mile away from where my friends live. It may have been the beer. I lost track and thought I had to go home to my wife and daughters.

It is so easy within hours of arriving in Chicago to believe I had never left. I know how to get around, driving myself. I know where to shop, where to eat, where to drink. I know the city like the back of my hand. It is a city I proudly call my home. It’s a place where the ordinary citizen can enjoy music, plays, festivals…all free; all in celebration of the citizen.

Back in Delhi, I find the city only works for VIPs. Ordinary citizens have to fend for themselves. Nevertheless, citizens do not cover themselves in glory either. They drive like lunatics, make general nuisances of themselves including urinating on the street and defecating in public view.

One of the issues that never came up for discussion that night was India’s quest for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But it weighed on my mind. If the various local and state governments and the federal government cannot stop people from peeing or defecating on the streets, never mind the Naxalites or a rational policy governing foreign investors, why would anyone back India for a seat as a permanent member?

A permanent member of the Security Council is expected to have a foreign policy that includes a broad commitment to international community that your policies will enhance the world’s security. For that you need a strategic vision, which is nowhere in evidence.

Which is why India will never have a city like Chicago: aesthetically pleasing, citizen friendly and forever innovative.



Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010

Monday, June 7, 2010

Bureaucratic Subversion

The Bane of New India


When the government steered the Right to Education bill through Parliament, those of us who had fought for it through two decades were pleased. The important thing, however, is how the act would be notified. The language of the bill leaves a lot of gray areas. And well it might because bureaucrats wrote it and they will fully exploit the obfuscation. For example, they will come down heavily on private schools that cater to the poor in urban slums and rural areas and impose impossible conditions that such enterprises simply cannot fulfill.

There are too many vested interests: the government school system; the high-end private schools that have bribed their way into existence and above all, the alternative NGO schools that survive on government subsidies. With such firepower arraigned against it, the RTE bill will go the way of every well-meaning initiative of the government such the NREGA or the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan. The net outcome will be zero. And so everything will come to naught.

If this sounds cynical, then you should listen to my story about a small community on the outskirts of Delhi. This is an upscale community of successful professionals that includes about 30 houses. It is an oasis in the chaos of Delhi, with trees and birdsong. It’s a wonderful community where neighbors meet frequently to have a drink or dinner and to discuss issues of India’s development. The people who live there are respected professionals whose interests span public health, wildlife conservation, media, law and what have you.

The community came into being in the early 1990s. Because it was part of rural Delhi, it was offered no municipal services like water, sanitation or roads, never mind street lighting. Like pioneers, residents made their own arrangements: people built septic tanks, drilled bore wells and got their own garbage collection. Power was an issue until distribution was privatized, when the resident association petitioned the distribution company. Realizing these were high-end customers, the company quickly ensured that power cuts and fluctuations were minimized.

On the roads issue, the resident association petitioned the Delhi government arguing from a taxpayer viewpoint; so the road was built: badly but still motorable. It took several years including the fact that the first allotment of several crores was swallowed by the pirates of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Now this community faces water a problem because the bore wells have dried up. This is precious real estate but more important it represents the single major investment for most of the residents. Without water, their homes are worth nothing.

The association applied to the Delhi government for permission to drill a community bore well. It seemed a logical and eco-friendly thing to do. But between the local water authority, the local police and several residents who had bribed their way into deepening their bore wells, the application has been kicked around from pillar to post.

So here you have this huge Indian-style standoff: members of the community paid bribes to the water authority and the police to deepen their wells. As a result, other residents found their bore wells running dry. When the association sought to build a community well, some residents and recipients of their bribes in the water authority and the local police struck a dissonant note.

Between corrupt citizens, bureaucrats, police officials and local politicians, this pleasant community is caught in a cleft. It needs the rule of law to be enforced but the local government: the municipality and the police, are locked in various corrupt projects. Residents of the community are not without influence but stand divided because several members, who own houses there, are compromised because the deals they did to buy their houses don’t stand up to scrutiny.

This is a small localized community problem, to be sure. But its implications have a larger footprint. Even though the union government has introduced various enlightened policies, local governance is caught in a medieval time warp. In the matter of schools as well: a sweeping and enlightened law stands to be subverted on the rocks of bad governance. In notifying the RTE act, many activists fear the education bureaucracy will not let private schools for the poor flourish.

Then there is the issue of the RTE-mandated 25 percent quota for poor children in private schools. The vast majority of private schools, however, cater to the poor. So how will the quota be enforced? Clearly, framers of the bill were thinking of the elite private schools with no acknowledgment of the private schools for the poor.

Whether it is the private schools for the poor or the community bore well for the upscale Delhi community, governance is still held hostage to the ideology of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy lords it over the poor and is prejudiced against the affluent (not rich). In the event, private schools for the poor will be held hostage to the bureaucracy’s prejudice against education as commerce; likewise the South Delhi community must suffer because the bureaucrats of the water authority dismiss it as an “affluent colony” that deserves nothing from the government.

In the end, the admirable RTE bill stands to be subverted by bureaucrats, who oppose all change. Residents of the affluent community will have to fight for their water against the very forces in charge of governance.

An edited version of this article appeared in Education World, June 2010.



Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010

Friday, June 4, 2010

Last mile governance incubus

When the government steered the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill 2009 through Parliament, those of us who had fought for it for two decades were pleased. The important thing, however, is how the Act has been notified. The language of the newly enacted RTE Act leaves a lot of grey areas. And well it might because bureaucrats wrote it and they will fully exploit the obfuscation. For example, they will come down heavily on private schools that cater to the poor in urban slums and rural areas and impose impossible conditions that such enterprises simply cannot fulfill.
Having delayed the universalisation of primary and upper primary education for six decades, now there are too many vested interests. The government school system; high-end private schools that have bribed their way into existence and above all, the alternative NGO schools that survive on government subsidies. With such firepower arraigned against it, the RTE Act will go the way of every well-meaning initiative of the government such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) or Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan. The net outcome will be zero or near zero.
If this sounds cynical, then you should pay heed to my story about a small comm-unity on the outskirts of Delhi. It’s an upscale community of successful professionals which includes about 30 households. The community came into being in the early 1990s. But because it was part of rural Delhi, it was deprived of municipal services such as water, sanitation and roads, never mind street lighting. Like pioneers, residents made their own arrangements: they built septic tanks, drilled borewells and arranged for the collection of garbage. Power was an issue until distribution was privatised, when the resident association petitioned the distribution company. Realising these were high-end customers, the company quickly ensured that power cuts and fluctuations were minimised.
These endeavours took several years and unearthed the fact that their first allotment of several crores was swallowed by the pirates of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Now this community faces a water problem because its borewells have dried up. This is precious real estate which represents a lifetime investment for most residents. Without water, their charming homes are worth nothing.
The residents’ association applied to the state govern-ment for permission to drill a community borewell. It seemed a logical and eco-friendly thing to do. But between the local water authority, the local police and several residents who had bribed their way into deepening their private borewells, the application was kicked around from pillar to post.
Consequently there’s a huge Indian-style standoff. As some members of the community paid bribes to the water authority and the police to deepen their wells, as a result other residents found their borewells running dry. When the associa-tion sought to build a community well, some residents and recipients of bribes in the water authority and the local police refused permission.
Between corrupt citizens, bureaucrats, police officials and local politicians, this pleasant community is caught in a bind. It needs the rule of law to be enforced but the local government, municipality and the police are locked in a conspiracy of corruption. Residents of the community are not without political influence but stand divided because several members who own houses there, are compromised because the deals they did to buy their houses don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Admittedly, this is a small localised community problem. But its implications have a larger footprint. Even though the Union government has introduced various enlightened policies, local governance is caught in a medieval time warp. In the matter of schools as well, a sweeping and enlightened law seems likely to be wrecked on the rocks of bad last mile governance. In notifying the RTE Act, many activists fear the education bureaucracy will invoke the provisions of the Act to eliminate the option that the poor fleeing indifferent government school education have to attend low cost private schools.
Then there is the issue of the RTE-mandated 25 percent quota for poor children in private schools. The vast majority of private schools, however, already cater to the poor. So how will the quota be enforced? Clearly, framers of the Act were thinking of the elite private schools with no acknowledgment of the private schools for the poor.
Whether it is private schools for the poor or the community borewell for upscale citizens, governance is still hostage to the ideology of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy lords it over the poor and is prejudiced against the affluent (though not the super-rich). In the event, private schools for the poor will be trampled under the bureaucracy’s prejudice against education as commerce. Likewise the South Delhi community must suffer because bureaucrats of the water authority dismiss it as an “affluent colony” that deserves nothing from government.
In the end, the admirable RTE Act will be subverted by bureaucrats, who oppose all change. Similarly residents of the affluent South Delhi community will have to fight for their water against the forces in charge of local last mile governance.

(An edited version of this post will appear in http://www.educationworld.in, June 4, 2010.)

Thursday, June 3, 2010

American Life 3

New York City: My Daughter’s Hometown


So here I am back again in the city that never sleeps. The airline has a limo waiting to take me to Gramercy, where my gorgeous daughter has an apartment. Her timing was perfect. By 6 pm, when I got to her place, she pulled up in a cab right behind me and helped me lug my bag upstairs to her apartment. What happened in between was a huge hug and kisses and the limo guy looked on indulgently

I’m back in Manhattan to spend the weekend with my very clued-in daughter. The weekend was a rediscovery of the Lower East Side with its great bars and amazing restaurants. She spent the time showing me her life in this wannabe piece of real estate in Lower Manhattan, where most people, especially twenty-somethings like her, would give their right arm to live. She lives there and knows it in a way that appeals to my sense of hedonism and aesthetics.

Can you be jealous of your own daughter? Difficult question: but I have no hesitation in saying I am envious of her lifestyle. Plus she is so Manhattan; she buys milk with no hormones, grass-fed meat, nuts, berries, dates and also cheese, wine, figs, dates, strawberries and the occasional champagne.

I’ve been visiting Manhattan since the early 1970s. I had a friend who introduced me to the genteel pleasures of the Upper East Side. I also came into the city for work and lived in fabulous hotels like The Plaza. But knowing the city through my daughter’s eyes is completely different. Clearly, she belongs there and makes me feel I too belong. And I can’t even begin to say how good it feels to have New York City as a second home.

So what is it about New York City, especially the Lower East Side that attracts bright young kids from all over the world to stay there? Chicago, where I virtually grew up, is a superb city. Its downtown Lakefront is seminally brilliant. Yet my daughter’s Lower East Side has character that is part gentrified but nevertheless is a neighborhood with ethnic diversity and post-modern slick.

I spent several weekends with her in the very recent past and she always managed to amaze me. We walked all over the place, went to great bars and ate in superb restaurants. When I was with her and drinking all these great cocktails and eating all this fabulous food, I thought to myself: my baby daughter is a New York girl: king of the hill; top of the pops.

Can a father be jealous of his daughter? No. I wish her well as one of the most fortunate members of the human race: not just to live in Manhattan but in the happening Lower East Side. I always tell my wife: if I ever had the chance to live and work there, I may have never relocated to India. In the event, nearly two decades since I moved to Delhi from the US, I have never regretted the relocation. But if I had been the suave sophisticate that my daughter is, India would never have featured in my life.

So I spent time with her in the city, walking the streets and in small parks that are things of beauty with gorgeous spring flowers; eating in wonderful restaurants and generally luxuriating in the ultimate urban experience. Between my warm and lovable daughter and the adventurous pleasure of Lower Manhattan, I was in heaven.

On the Monday, I took the flight to Chicago, comforted in the knowledge that I would be back within the week. I used always to spend more time in my hometown Chicago, than anywhere else in the US. For the past seven years, I seem to be spending more time in New York City, thanks to my daughter.

Manhattan may not be about blue skies and trees of green; it’s my daughter’s favorite song: Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” Truly, it is a wonderful world she lives in.




Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010