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By Nityanand Jayaraman Post-tsunami, organisations are vying to adopt this village or set up that school. But tsunami or no tsunami, the urban fisherfolk and coastal poor live in miserable conditions. Why does it take a sudden disaster to mobilise us? What about the daily disaster of living experienced by India's poor and pollution-impacted communities?
The tsunami must have washed away what little was left of Tamil Nadu’s collective common sense. To this day – it’s January 14 – people are hesitant to eat fish. Not just seafish, but river fish and lake fish. In Cuddalore, I actually saw consumer advisories issued ostensibly by the District Collector and the Department of Health warning consumers against eating seafood. Rumours of a baby’s finger found in the belly of a fish fanned the anti-seafood paranoia. Newspaper reports and rumours instructed us that fish feeding off the dead bodies of cattle and people would carry infection. The Fisheries Department issued a cautious response requesting the Department of Health to conduct appropriate studies to ensure that the fish are safe and to remove the ban on consumption of seafood thereafter. Subsequently, the District Collector clarified that the fish could be eaten. By then, the scare had set in. A few thousand carcasses and the mighty ocean. My common sense tells me that fears of contaminated seafood may be unfounded. But I’m a staunch believer in the Precautionary Principle – one doesn’t have to wait for scientific certainty to take action to protect public health and the environment. The principle recommends that protective action should be taken when reasonable doubt exists, and confirmation or negation can come subsequently. So if the erstwhile seafood ban was by way of abundant caution, great. If such a precautionary approach – where people really cared about what they ate and where it came from – really existed, that would be encouraging. But nowhere could such a consumer concern be more ironical than in Tamil Nadu. People living in the cities and towns of this state are characterised by a singular lack of potty training. People believe that open water bodies are meant for defecation. I’m not referring only to the poor here. Even the well-to-do have their untreated sewage conveyed to this region’s most efficient natural rainwater harvesting system – the Pallikaranai marshlands – by a government agency. True, the rich may squat behind closed doors, and the poor do it in the open. The net effect on the environment is the same. The irony doesn’t end here. Further south in Cuddalore, I met S Palanivel , a 32-year-old fisherman recently settled in Semmankuppam. I was travelling through Cuddalore with two other journalist friends and a social activist to identify villages and villagers that we heard had been affected but were left out of the relief programme. Palanivel belongs to the community of sea-going fisherfolk – the Pattinavars. But after some dispute over his having married a woman from Chennai (probably from a different community) against the wishes of the village, Palanivel decided to move out of his village, Pettainagar, and resettle across the River Uppanar in Semmankuppam. Because of this alienation, he has been left out of the list of affected people by the Pettainagar fisher panchayat, even though he lost his kattumaram (catamaran) and nets. He lives in a ramshackle one-room hut with a crude thatch roof barely 5 metres from the Uppanar, and midway between two looming smelly chemical factories. After more than 10 days of forced fishing holiday following the tsunami, hunger drove Palanivel to the river. He got a good catch, more than 50-rupees worth of fair-sized madavas (mullet). But Palanivel says he was unable to sell it. “Some people near the tea shop threatened me. ‘What? You want to kill all of us with your fish?’ they said. Everybody is scared that the fish may be contaminated.” Strange, given that tsunami or no tsunami, contamination is well taken care of by the 25-odd chemical industries that operate along the banks of the Uppanar. Many of these companies illegally discharge their untreated effluents in the river, and legally discharge their untreated effluents into the sea. Fisherfolk’s complaints on this count have been met with the stoicism characteristic of bureaucrats: “Pollution is under control. . .negligible. We’re monitoring it regularly. It’s a lot better now compared to what it was 10 years ago. Zero discharge since 2000.” These platitudes are heard way too often. Seldom, though, are such claims by regulators like the Pollution Control Board supported by scientific evidence. If one’s worried enough by the possibility of pathological contamination caused by corpses in the ocean, why is there no concern about the pesticides that are intentionally added to your food or the toxic effluents that poison our rivers, seas and groundwater? * * * A friend told me that the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund received more in 10 days following the tsunami than the Gujarat earthquake did in one year. I don’t know if that is accurate or not. But that is not the point. The point is that there’s more money than you can shake a stick at, and you can’t stop it coming. Every day, friends and family call up with the same refrain: “We have a small group of friends, and we’d like to help with the tsunami relief. But we want to make sure that the money reaches the most needy, and that the money actually reaches.” The overwhelming generosity and sympathy is both encouraging and intriguing. Encouraging, because it indicates that there are a large number of people who care and are keen to see how they can help. Intriguing, because it takes a calamitous event to bring the caring out. Intriguing also because people seldom see the role of society in exacerbating the effects of such events. Even before the tsunami struck, a growing tide of affluence crept inexorably towards the coast, pushing the poor to the edges of land, literally marginalising them. Take the case of the kuppams (fishing village) in Besant Nagar in Chennai. Besant Nagar is one of the most gentrified neighbourhoods in the city. What used to be a quiet stretch of beach with fishing villages dotting either end is now a veritable urban hustle. The middle class has crept into virtually every nook and corner of the immediate hinterland, pushing the fishing community and other poor to the edge of the coast. While Besant Nagar has become a choice neighbourhood for the middle-class, the residents of the kuppams live in squalid conditions. Earlier, they used to have a stretch of beach for drying their fish, another stretch behind the wooded area to use as a toilet. Now all that free space has been taken over by the well-to-do; the coastal poor have no place to go. Middle-class Besant Nagar and the kuppam across the road are worlds apart. People on this side do not, as a rule, go to the other side. People from the other side come to the middle-class side only to work in their houses as household help or as auto drivers. Life in the crowded kuppams in and around urban centres is hellish. The lack of space and water means lack of hygiene. With nothing to do, the youth waste their time, or worse, turn to crime. This social malaise has gone unnoticed until the tsunami turned the spotlight on the fisherfolk. Until the tsunami, the fisherfolk could well not have existed. In all these years, there has been little assistance from caring people to ensure that children in the kuppams have better education and health, or don’t go to bed unfed. But that is changed. Post-tsunami, organisations are vying, even competing, to ‘adopt’ this village, or set up that school. Tsunami or no tsunami, the urban fisherfolk and coastal poor are living in miserable conditions. And the rest of society has a very tangible role in pushing them to this state. Isn’t it curious that many of those living in Besant Nagar and others that may have knowingly or unknowingly contributed to the marginalisation of the fisherfolk gave selflessly to help the tsunami-affected? Another example that comes to mind is that of the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal . Much like the case of the tsunami, people flocked to Bhopal during the aftermath to help with relief and rehabilitation. Money poured in, albeit in quantities far below what we’re now seeing. Bhopal was a catastrophic event. But a thousand Bhopals are unfolding in slow motion across the country, in virtually every neighbourhood that hosts a chemical factory. These mini-Bhopals are caused by the routine pollution from factories, and are characterised by community protests in the cases where the community is alive, and by quietly suffering multitudes where the community lies divided by the industries and their contractors. If the tsunami and Bhopal represent a sudden death, the daily disaster of living experienced by India ’s poor and pollution-impacted communities is like a silent, creeping cancer. For the poor and the politically marginalised, life is a daily struggle to overcome poverty, retain dignity and assert their political power. Why aren’t we doing more to support the struggles of these communities on a more consistent basis? Why can’t a few thousands out of the millions who want to give for the tsunami instead turn to support the ongoing struggles for justice and dignity by India ’s poor? (Nityanand Jayaraman is an independent journalist and researcher focussing on investigating corporate abuses of the environment and human rights. He is based in Chennai, and is associated with the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal) InfoChange News & Features, January 2005
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