Is Pakistan India's Real Enemy? Or Is It Hindu Nationalists?

[Riaz Haq]

First came "boli nahi, goli"  (Bullets, not talks). Then came "chappan inch ki chhaati" (56 inch chest, 44 actual according to Modi's tailor). It seems that India's Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi's soaring rhetoric against Pakistan continues to soar ever higher.

Modi's rising rhetoric is now being emulated by his lieutenants including Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar, Home Minister Rajnath Singh and most recently Information Minister Rajyavardhan Rathore. Rathore is reported to have claimed that Indian forces have struck deep inside Myanmar and this Indian action has sent a "message" to Pakistan.  Indian military and Myanmar have both denied there was any cross-border attack into Myanmar.

World's Dirtiest Cities Source: Quartz India

As I was reading the news of Hindu Nationalists' saber-rattling,  I started to wonder who is India's real enemy? Is it Pakistan? Or China? Or is it India's domestic problems of poverty, hunger, illiteracy, lack of  clear air and access to clean water and basic hygiene that result in tens of millions of deaths each year? Do the Indian leaders not know that their country is home to the world's largest population of poor, hungry and illiterates? Did recent heatwave deaths of over 2000 Indians not remind of India's extreme vulnerability to climate change?

Is it not true that more than half of India lacks access to clean water and toilets? Are they not aware that 13 of the top 20 most polluted cities are in India and 3 in Pakistan?  Do they not know that New Delhi is the dirtiest city in the world? Have they not seen data showing hopelessness is driving 30 to 40 Indian youths per 100,000  to suicide, among the highest rates in the world?

As these thoughts were running through my mind, I came upon a recent New York Times report  titled "Holding Your Breath in India" filed by the newspaper's New Delhi correspondent Gardener Harris who has been living in the Indian capital for several years.  Here are some of his observations:

1. We gradually learned that Delhi’s true menace came from its air, water, food and flies. These perils sicken, disable and kill millions in India annually, making for one of the worst public health disasters in the world. Delhi, we discovered, is quietly suffering from a dire pediatric respiratory crisis, with a recent study showing that nearly half of the city’s 4.4 million schoolchildren have irreversible lung damage from the poisonous air.

2. The city’s air is more than twice as polluted as Beijing’s, according to the World Health Organization. (India, in fact, has 13 of the world’s 25 most polluted cities, while Lanzhou is the only Chinese city among the worst 50; Beijing ranks 79th.)

3. For much of the year, the Yamuna River would have almost no flow through Delhi if not for raw sewage. Add in the packs of stray dogs, monkeys and cattle even in urban areas, and fresh excretions are nearly ubiquitous. Insects alight on these excretions and then on people or their food, sickening them.

4. Very high levels of air pollution hurt children the most. But it's not just children.  Many adults suffer near-constant headaches, sore throats, coughs and fatigue. Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s chief minister, had to leave the city for 10 days in March to cure a chronic cough.

5. It’s not just the air that inflicts harm. At least 600 million Indians, half the total population, defecate outdoors, and most of the effluent, even from toilets, is dumped untreated into rivers and streams. Still, I never thought this would come home to my family quite as dramatically as it did.

6. Most piped water here is contaminated. Poor sanitation may be a crucial reason nearly half of India’s children are stunted.

7. So many of our friends have decided to leave that the American Embassy School — this city’s great expat institution — is facing a steep drop in admissions next fall. My pastor, who ministers to a largely expat parish here, told me he feared he would lose 60 percent of his congregants this summer.

Hindu Nationalists led by Narendra Modi need to recognize that their biggest enemy is widespread deep domestic deprivation of their people. They need to join hands with Pakistan and other neighbors to focus their energies and resources to provide decent living standards to their people. They need to understand that there will no winners in any war they launch against Pakistan. Instead, all of the people of South Asia region will be big losers.  The sooner they realize these facts the better it is for the people of South Asia.

Related Links:

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India's Israel Envy: What If Modi Attacks Pakistan?

Why Are Indians Less Happy Than Pakistanis?

India-Pakistan Economic Comparison 2014

An Indian Farmer Commits Suicide Every 30 Minutes

Challenging Gall-Haqqani-Paul Narrative of Pakistan

MPI Shows Depth of Deprivation in India

India Leads the World in Open Defecation

India Leads the World in Child Marriages

India's Share of World's Poor Jumps to 33%

India-Pakistan De-Hyphenation Debate

[Riaz Haq]

Before #Nestle #Maggi Noodles Scare: Look at What the U.S. #FDA Found in #India made Snacks #Haldiram http://on.wsj.com/1GuQfQr via @WSJIndia

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A grocery shop in New Delhi, June 3.

 

Associated Press

Indian regulators’ findings that samples of Nestlé SANESN.VX +0.01% Maggi instant noodles contained impermissibly high levels of lead stunned middle-class consumers this month. But long before India yanked the product off store shelves, U.S. food-safety inspectors had deemed hundreds of made-in-India snacks unfit for sale in America.

Data on the website of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration show that it rejected more snack imports from India than from any other country in the first five months of 2015. In fact, more than half of all the snack products that were tested and then blocked from sale in the U.S. this year were from India. Indian products led the world in snack rejects last year as well.

Mexico, a much larger trading partner of the U.S., was second in terms of rejections this year, followed by South Korea. China — whose exports to the U.S. are worth ten times as much as In...was a distant eighth.

And it’s not just snack foods. The U.S. FDA has rejected all sorts of imports from India, including everything from cosmetics to drugs to ceramics.

The Wall Street Journal made with Datawrapper

So why did the Indian snacks fail the U.S. FDA tests?

The reasons vary from problems in packaging and labeling to alleged contamination. The FDA website says Indian products have been found to contain high levels of pesticides, mold and the bacteria salmonella.

In one colorful description this February of a product from the western state of Gujarat, which the FDA identified only as “snack foods not elsewhere mentioned,” it said it blocked the import as it “appears to consist in whole or in part of a filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance or be otherwise unfit for food.”

While India’s national food-safety watchdog doesn’t monitor exports, it has been rushing to test everything from soups to pastas to instant noodles sold domestically in the wake of the Nestlé findings.

Sales of Nestlé’s Maggi noodles were officially blocked across the country last Friday, after the Food Safety and Standards Authority said it found them “unsafe and hazardous for human consumption.”  Nestlé on Thursday challenged the ban in court and said its own tests hadn’t detected elevated levels of lead, as authorities alleged.

Heightened concern over the safety of processed food in India has pushed the Indian authorities into a testing frenzy. But its chief says he doesn’t have the manpower or facilities to check the millions of packaged products that fill the kitchen cabinets in the world’s second-most populous nation.

“Food-safety is a very sensitive thing in developed countries,” so countries like the U.S. have better food-safety infrastructure, said Yudhvir Singh Malik, the chief executive of the authority.  “A lot of that sense is still to come in developing countries.”

Most Indian snacks rejected by the FDA this year were from the Nagpur-based food company Haldiram’s. Among the rejected Haldiram’s products were some sugar candies and salty Indian snack mixes. The FDA said on its website that it rejected the Haldiram’s products because it found pesticides in them.

A.K. Tyagi, a senior-vice president at Haldiram’s, said its food “is 100% safe and complies with the law of the land.” Discrepancies, he said, arise because food-safety standards differ in India and the U.S. “A pesticide that is permitted in India may not be allowed there. And even if it is, they may not allow it in the same concentration as it is here,” he said.

Indian baked snacks also had troubles getting into the States. Out of 217 imported baked products rejected by the U.S. FDA so far this year, more than half were made in India. One of them was a biscuit pack manufactured by India’s largest biscuit-maker, Britannia Industries Ltd.

On its website, the FDA said the packaging of the product didn’t list all ingredients and failed provide consumers adequate nutrition information. Britannia, in response, said it didn’t authorize the shipment.

“Britannia exports to the U.S. only out of U.S. FDA registered factories in India and meets product/labeling standards,” the company said in an email. “These may be instances of shipments made by independent exporters based out of India.”

[Riaz Haq]

#Myanmar Photo goof-up leaves #India Army red-faced - The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article7307118.ece …

The Army, which has been commended by all for its surgical strikes against insurgents on the Myanmar border, was left red-faced when it came to light that two photographs doing the rounds on the media and social media platforms were actually from operations in 2009 and not of the current one.

As soon the error was spotted, the Defence Ministry issued a statement that it did not release any such photographs. “A Clarification: MoD has not issued any photo relating to Indian Army action along Indo-Myanmar border in the North East, so far,” Defence Ministry spokesperson Sitanshu Kar tweeted on Wednesday.

Later, it was found that the Army had cleared the photographs.

An Army officer clarified on Thursday that the 2009 photographs were approved as a “representative picture” and “it did not mean it was an operational picture”. 

[Riaz Haq]

According to a report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, "the economic impact of containing and dealing with the consequences of India's levels of violence was estimated to cost the national economy $341.7 billion in 2014. This is equivalent to 4.7 per cent of India's GDP” (Hindu, HT, ET). Moreover, according to the 2015 Global Peace Index (GPI) published on Wednesday, India ranked at 143 out of 162 countries. Within the region India ranked 5th out of the 7 South Asian countries ahead of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The GPI report cited escalating civil strife and the consequent refugee crisis have been among the major factors behind the rising cost of global violence containment. Iceland emerged as the world’s most peaceful nation, while Syria got the bottom spot.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/violence-in-india-impacts-economy-to-t...

[Riaz Haq]

80% of #India’s surface water may be polluted, report by international body says http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/pollution/80-of... … via @timesofindia Even as India is making headlines with its rising air pollution levels, the water in the country may not be any better. An alarming 80% of India's surface water is polluted, a latest assessment by WaterAid, an international organization working for water sanitation and hygiene, shows.

The report, based on latest data from the ministry of urban development (2013), census 2011 and Central Pollution Control Board, estimates that 75-80% of water pollution by volume is from domestic sewerage, while untreated sewerage flowing into water bodies including rivers have almost doubled in recent years.

This in turn is leading to increasing burden of vector borne diseases, cholera, dysentery, jaundice and diarrhea etc. Water pollution is found to be a major cause for poor nutritional standards and development in children also.

Between 1991 and 2008, the latest period for which data is available, flow of untreated sewerage has doubled from around 12,000 million litres per day to 24,000 million litres per day in Class I and II towns.

The database defines Class I towns as those with a population of more than 1 lakh, whereas towns with population ranging between 50,000 to 1 lakh are classified as Class II.

The report, titled 'Urban WASH: An Assessment on Faecal Sludge Management (FSM) Policies and Programmes at the National and State Level', is likely to be released next week.

According to the report, inadequate sanitation facilities, poor septage management and a near absence of sanitation and waste water policy framework are primary reasons responsible for the groundwater and surface water pollution in the country.

[Riaz Haq]

The curious case of world's most polluted city #Delhi #India http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/india/shweta-kothari/the-curious-case-... …

In an uncanny incidence earlier this year, the US embassy in India bought 1,800 air purifiers in New Delhi. It was later deciphered as a protective measure for the US president Barack Obama from Delhi's toxic air. The air we have been breathing away all our life was deemed so detrimental for the president that the US authorities insisted on curtailing Obama's outdoor activities, according to a newspaper report.
In the past, when fuel emission norms were a far flung reality and vehicle sector was booming, the state of Delhi air had started showing visible signs of impact. So much so that Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) issued an advertisement about 16 years back: "Roll down the window of your bullet-proof car, Mr Prime Minister. The security threat is not the gun, it is the air of Delhi." The environment lobbies vociferously demanded a roadmap for pollution control. Even as some of the demands were met; such as the thrust on clean fuel, use of CNG, Vehicular emission standards etc, the situation steadily depreciated.
So much so that, in November, December and January of 2014-15, the quality of air in Delhi was recorded to be severely polluted for more than 65 per cent of the days. The Delhi Pollution Control Committee data also showed consistently high level of PM2.5 (particulate matter), one of the finest pollutants, capable of making inroads into human lung and blood tissue and increase the risk of heart and lung diseases. While the WHO (World Health Organization) has set a limit of 25 microgram per meter cube, in the past three years the PM2.5 level in the metropolis has been roughly 130 to 170 microgram per cubic meter; 5-7 times more than the permissible limit.
The issue got fresh impetus when Delhi surpassed Beijing to become world’s most polluted city. Soon thereafter, National Green Tribunal (NGT), took cognizance of the matter and held vehicles as the main movement of aviation contamination, thus banning all diesel vehicles over ten years old from plying on Delhi roads. In an earlier judgment last year, NGT had similarly banned petrol vehicles over 15 years old in Delhi. Yet, this time around, the verdict met overwhelming response.
While the Delhi government was quick to applaud the decision and promised swift action, the central government appealed against the ban. Citing an IIT Delhi study, counsel argued that the old vehicles contributes a negligible amount of the air pollution. Various stakeholders mooted their own apprehension of the alarming level of pollutants in the urban center. Speaking to CNBC, Sunita Narain from Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) alleged that the government is hands in gloves with the transport sector. Naming the big three commercial vehicle manufacturers, Narain held the government responsible for steering the interest of automobile manufacturers, disregarding public health emergency and ignoring the health risks from direct exposure to vehicular fume.