G4S’ contract to manage Brook House, and neighbouring Tinsley House, was due to expire this month. Yet the tender process to re-award the contract has now been scrapped. The Home Office says it will start again later in 2018 – after two independent reviews into the centre, and the detention system as a whole, have concluded. In the meantime, detainees will continue to live under G4S rule. It is not clear how much G4S will make from the two extra years, but the initial contract has been valued at £150 million.

G4S also has other ongoing immigration detention contracts: children’s “welfare services” in the deportation “family unit” at Tinsley House; and detainee healthcare services at Yarl’s Wood as well as in the two Gatwick centres.

But G4S is still not the whole story. Two more big detention contracts are due to expire next year: Campsfield, run by Mitie; and Dungavel in Scotland, run by GEO. Tenders are typically announced over a year in advance, but so far there is no news on either. Is the Home Office freezing all detention contracts, with their profiteers in place, waiting for public attention to die down?

It is in this context that we release our updated Detention Centres Factsheet. Around 2,500 people are locked up without trial or time limit in the Home Office’s immigration detention centres at any moment. The Factsheet gives an overview of the 10 main detention centres (and 30-plus other “short term holding centres”); flags up some key facts and trends; and identifies the main companies profiting from the detention regime.

The post Rewards of abuse: detention shambles as G4S’ Brook House contract extended appeared first on Corporate Watch.

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Thirty people in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, lost sight in one or both eyes after being injected with a version of the drug Altuzan in a government hospital in March 2013. Nine had to have eyes removed as a result of the problems caused by the injections.

The case has caused much protest and controversy in Kurdistan, with many people already heavily critical of the two ruling parties – the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) – for the lack of decent services provided. The director of the hospital concerned has since resigned.

The newly-formed Eye to Eye campaign has demanded the Ministry of Health disclose all relevant information about the case, including details of who supplied the Altuzan and whether it was a counterfeit version. Altuzan is the brand name that the Avastin drug is sold under in Turkey.

Questions have also been raised over the role of FDAS, a British company that, according to their website, signed an “agreement” with the Kurdistan Regional Government in September 2012 to provide “analytical testing services to the Kurdistan Medicines Control Agency (KMCA) to support actions to improve the quality of medicines in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq”. Their website contains two articles on the subject, and a video of their representatives signing the agreement.

The company has not responded to accusations made by the Eye to Eye campaign that it should have tested the drugs prior to the injections, and that it failed to properly do so.

Corporate Watch asked the Nottingham-based company for a response to this but the response we received was puzzling. The company said it did “not have and has never had a contract with the Kurdistan Regional Government to provide its services”, appearing to contradict its own website.

Their statement to us continued:

“Food & Drug Analytical Services does provide testing services indirectly and on an as requested basis to the Kurdistan Medicines Control Agency (KMCA). This is in our capacity as a service provider for one of our clients Britt Pharm Ltd, Company Number 07325977 located in Grimsby, Lincolnshire.”

Search for Britt Pharm in Companies House and you’ll find a tiny company, the last annual accounts of which showed assets of just £3 and declared the company to be dormant. You’ll also find that until April 2012 it was called FDAS Britt Ltd.

The most recent annual return registered for Britt Pharm/FDAS Britt says its owners are Hussein Al-Bayat, Khalaf Merza and Mahdi Ismail, who is also the sole director. It is unclear how they are connected to the Nottingham-based FDAS, which is owned by current and former directors Stephen Jones, Larissa Taylor, Trevor Ray and Eric Hilton plus the venture capital investors East Midlands Regional Venture Capital Fund No 1 and the publicly-funded East Midlands Early Growth Fund.

Corporate Watch has so far been unable to get in contact with Grimsby-based Britt Pharm/FDAS Britt, and the Nottingham-based FDAS would not say what the link was between the two companies, or give us contact details.

The Ministry of Health of Kurdistan has since published details of the contract and, sure enough, FDAS Britt is named. Intriguingly though, the individual named with the company is Eric Hilton, Sales Directors and shareholder of the Nottingham-based FDAS.

The contract says FDAS Britt has had to put a security deposit of $1.5m in the Kurdistan Governmental Bank, and that the KMCA can deduct fines from that sum if things go wrong. But if Britt Pharm/FDAS Britt still only has assets of £3, where has that money come from?

‘Fundamental uncertainty’

The Nottingham-based FDAS also chose not to respond to the most important accusation of the lot: that they failed to adequately monitor and inspect the medicines that caused the problems.

FDAS did tell us that they had carried out a test on a sample of Altuzan in April 2013, the month after the injections were made. According to their statement, they were not “party to the details or the outcome of this investigation” and instructed us to contact Britt Pharm to find out more.

Corporate Watch asked the Kurdistan Regional Government’s London representation for clarification but, after initially being promised a response, nothing has come.

The most recent accounts for the Nottingham-based FDAS (under its full name of Food & Drug Analytical Services Ltd) show the company is in a troubled financial situation, with negative equity of £546,000. The auditors also express a “fundamental uncertainty” over the company’s “ability to continue in operational existence for the foreseeable future”.

It is understandable therefore that FDAS is keen for the current controversy to blow over, especially as they say they are “looking forward to strengthening our relationships with our Erbil and MENA [Middle East and North Africa] countries clients.”

But if they continue to avoid questions about their role in the KRG, people in Kurdistan will continue to demand answers.

If you have any additional information about the role of FDAS in the KRG, please get in touch on 00442074260005 or contact[at]corporatewatch.org.

The post British company FDAS under scrutiny in Iraqi Kurdistan after 30 people lose sight appeared first on Corporate Watch.

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The Scottish Police College is overseeing police recruitment in Sri Lanka, a country that the UN human rights chief warns “is heading in an increasingly authoritarian direction”, an investigation by Corporate Watch, published in the Sunday Herald, has found. UK aid money also paid for Sri Lanka’s top cop to train in Scotland before final war against Tamil Tigers.

The Scottish Police College (SPC) is deeply involved in creating Sri Lanka’s new National Police Academy. All Sri Lankan police recruits will follow a “contemporary and dynamic curriculum” being designed with the SPC. In addition, “training for thousands of existing partly trained officers will be prioritised based on the newly developed curriculum”. Scottish officers will coach Sri Lankan police trainers, “to ensure they are capable of delivering each of the re-designed programmes”.

The scheme started in November 2012, but its full extent has only just come to light through a Freedom of Information request to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), who handed over the project’s blueprint to Corporate Watch. The project is funded by Britain’s Conflict Prevention Pool, a ‘peace fund’ administered by three Whitehall bodies including the Department for International Development (DFID).

This revelation comes a week after the UN’s most senior human rights official, Navi Pillay, finished her inspection of Sri Lanka. Last weekend, Pillay said she was “deeply concerned” that Sri Lanka “is showing signs of heading in an increasingly authoritarian direction”, warning that “democracy has been undermined”. Pillay slammed the police for their “harassment and intimidation of a number of human rights defenders”, including priests and journalists, who were scheduled to meet the UN official. Human Rights Watch accuse Sri Lanka’s police of widespread rape in custody.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has defended the project and denied it was developing a police state. An FCO spokesperson told Corporate Watch that “British Government-supported justice and security projects have safeguards in place that seek to ensure our work does not contribute to human rights abuses. On the contrary, our police training reform project in Sri Lanka, led by the Scottish Police College (SPC), aims to embed international standards in police training”. The SPC said its advice to the Sri Lankan police includes human rights and “public relations” training.

British diplomats had anticipated the police training project may cause “some reputational or political risk”, but told the SPC that any criticism could “be mitigated effectively” by ensuring their “public communications on the project underline the positive human rights impacts of our assistance”, the ACPO document shows. Inauspiciously, when Scottish police experts arrived in Sri Lanka for their “initial scoping work” in November last year, riot police carried out a crack down on Tamil student protestors at Jaffna University.

Dodgy development?

Bruce Milne, that delegation’s lead staff member, has already faced criticism for his role in training the Maldives Police, after they allegedly orchestrated a coup ousting democratically-elected President Nasheed last year. Milne is an associate of the SPC and is available to them on a contractual basis. He runs a security consultancy firm, Learning and Solutions Ltd. Milne told Corporate Watch that neither his company nor his person has ever taken any payment directly from the Sri Lankan state. The British High Commission to Sri Lanka also covers the neighbouring Maldives.

 

Bruce Milne receives a “token of appreciation” from then Inspector General of Police, N.K. Illangakoon, October 2011. Credit: Sunday Observer

Scottish officers have been training Sri Lankan police chiefs for over six years; before and after the government’s final counter-insurgency campaign against the Tamil Tiger rebels. At the end of this conflict in May 2009, 12,000 suspected Tamil Tiger fighters were interned without trial. Tamil deaths had reached tens of thousands – estimates range from 30,000 to 140,000.

Corporate Watch’s investigation found that, in the build up to this combined police-military offensive, 48 Sri Lankan police officers were trained by the SPC from May 2007 to January 2008. One of these officers, Jayantha Wickremaratne, was then promoted to lead Sri Lanka’s police from June 2008 – October 2009, commanding the force at the height of its human rights violations.

Wickremaratne, along with five other senior Sri Lankan officers, had attended an “intense six week bespoke training programme to create a community based policing strategy for Sri Lanka”, including a visit to Northern Ireland, which was coordinated by Dr. David Garbutt (ex-chief constable of Scotland) during June 2007. The SPC confirmed they trained Wickremaratne but told Corporate Watch it had “no record held”, and declined to comment on his subsequent role as Inspector General of Police in Sri Lanka.

The post Scottish training for thousands of police in ‘authoritarian’ Sri Lanka appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Five years since the killing of six Congolese, including a three-year-old child, by the Ugandan army, new evidence obtained by Corporate Watch shows Heritage Oil and Gas was responsible for triggering the military operation that led to the deaths. Taimour Lay reveals the findings of a two-year investigation in East Africa that exposes a cover-up and raises further concerns over oil production in the region.

The incident, in which the Ugandan army opened fire on a Congolese passenger ferry on Lake Albert, was a direct consequence of Heritage Oil making a request for military assistance after its Ugandan exploration team had illegally strayed over the Democratic Republic of Congo border.

Despite the controversy over what happened on 24 September 2007, no full investigation was pursued by Heritage or Uganda. The Ugandan army claimed it was attacked by two Congolese army soldiers on the ferry who refused to give up their AK-47s and disputed that anyone had been killed. More credibly, Congolese witnesses accused the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UDPF) of firing indiscriminately almost as soon as they arrived.

A photograph published here for the first time and confirmed as genuine clearly shows two bloody casualties, while another shows coffins of the six people killed.

Victims are brought to the Congolese mainland shortly after the shootings

A United Nations fact-finding report, seen by Corporate Watch, also reveals that a three-year-old child was among the dead.

A Foreign Office email, obtained through a Freedom of Information request by oil watchdog Platform, reveals that the Ugandan military confirmed to the UK High Commission in Kampala at the time that its soldiers were on a “rescue mission” to help the Heritage team when it encountered the Congolese boat.

A leaked US diplomatic cable also confirms Heritage “mistakenly thinking that the approaching [UN] boats belonged to ‘negative forces’ put out an SOS call to which the UPDF’s patrol boats responded”. The new evidence directly contradicts Heritage’s claim at the time that the deaths were a “separate, unrelated, isolated incident” involving “no employees or subcontractors” of the company.

The coffins of the six victims are laid out before burial on 25 September 2007 in Kasenyi, DRC

Fuelling conflict

Founded by former mercenary Tony Buckingham, Heritage prides itself on being an “early entrant”, striking exploration deals in areas that bigger oil companies consider too risky. It is currently working in eight countries around the world, including Iraqi Kurdistan. The company made over $1 billion in 2011 from the sale of its licenses in western Uganda, having discovered up to one billion barrels in and around Lake Albert on the border with DRC.

Oil production is due to begin in western Uganda later this year after a decade of controversial exploration. Heritage’s former partner, Tullow Oil, also British, is now operating there with two industry giants: China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Total.

In 2007 Tullow was a 50-50 partner with Heritage in Block 3A (see map below), where the Heritage boat should have been on 24 September 2007, and was also a joint signatory to a 2006 Production Sharing Agreement on the Congolese side of Lake Albert. Tullow made no public comment after the deaths and did not publish any consideration of the risk of the exploration project.

The previously close relationship between Heritage and Uganda has broken down since the company cashed in on its licences and left the country in 2011. The government is currently pursuing Heritage over a $300 million tax bill.

“Calling in the cavalry”

The post Death on the lake: British oil company’s role in Congo killings exposed appeared first on Corporate Watch.

There has been a predictably indignant reaction to the news that Indian ministers wanted to stop British aid to the country and only allowed it to continue after the Department for International Development begged them. But if Conservative MPs and media commentators had calmed themselves down and looked at exactly what the DFID is planing in India, they would have realised the government is getting more for its money than they first thought.

The Sunday Telegraph reported at the weekend that foreign minister Nirumpama Rao had proposed in a memo “not to avail [of] any further DFID assistance,” because of the “negative publicity of Indian poverty promoted by the DFID,” while finance minister Pranab Mukherjee described British aid as “peanuts” and said India doesn’t need it. They allowed it to continue after DFID officials told them cancelling it would cause “grave political embarrassment”.

Conservative MP Philip Davies led the reaction, saying: “India spends tens of billions on defence and hundreds of millions a year on a space programme. In those circumstances, it would be unacceptable to give them aid even if they were begging us for it.” Sun columnist Trevor Kavanagh preferred sarcasm to incredulity: “we should weep for a country with more billionaires than Britain, a fortune in Swiss banks and a bigger middle class than Europe,” before bemoaning the injustice of giving aid to a country only for it not to buy your fighter jets: “India is so wealthy it can easily afford £13BILLION to buy the best warplanes in the world. Unfortunately, they’ve just spent it on French Rafales, not British Typhoons despite the £1.2BILLION we’ll hand them over five years”.

But neither Mukherjee, Rao, Davies nor Kavanagh need worry too much, as the DFID secretary of state Andrew Mitchell recently said half of the aid being given won’t really be aid at all. He told the Financial Times the programme in India was being “restructured” to give it the characteristics of a sovereign wealth fund, directing half of the budget towards private sector investments that “seek to lift millions of Indians out of poverty without making a loss”. “As far as the British taxpayer is concerned this is returnable capital,” Mitchell said, adding that the sovereign wealth fund model could be rolled out in other countries, including Uganda, Ghana and Ethiopia.

As the Dodgy Development series published by Corporate Watch showed, the DFID’s programme in India has always had the private sector at its heart, with often disastrous effects on people’s lives, which is why the equally pro-corporate Indian government continues to tolerate it. However, while previously the DFID’s aid programme would facilitate privatisation or corporate expansion into new areas – writing the policies that opened the state of Orissa to mining companies for example – turning the aid itself into an investment that demands a return takes this one step further. It would see the DFID acting in a similar way to the much-criticised Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), which a Private Eye investigation said “turned a fast buck funding shady businesses of little benefit to the developing world,” as it looked to make as big a profit as it could from a series of investments in enterprises including shopping malls and mining companies. Ominously, the Financial Times said the programme will help “reinvigorate” the CDC.

How Andrew Mitchell must wish people would take the time to realise his department isn’t as benevolent as they think it is.

See also:
Dodgy Development: Films and interviews challenging British aid in India
December 15, 2010

DFID helps Bangladesh ‘understand the private sector’
July 15, 2011

‘Educating’ tribal leaders about the ‘benefits’ of development in Ghana
August 19, 2010

Dodgy Development V: Power to the people?
May 05, 2010

Dodgy Development IV: ‘A DFID colony’
May 05, 2010

The post Profiting from ‘peanuts’: the DFID’s new plans in India appeared first on Corporate Watch.

The final part of the Dodgy Development: DFID in India series by Eshwarappa M and Richard Whittell, published by Corporate Watch over the past few months, focuses on the British government’s Department for International Development’s funding of civil society organisations. This part comprises a film and two interviews. The film, False Promises, looks at the ‘Business Partners for Development’ project, funded by the DFID, which convinced people to allow a coal company to mine their lands with devastating results. In the two interviews that conclude the series, two people’s organisation activists discuss why groups like theirs should not take the DFID’s money and argue for the importance and necessity of international, people to people solidarity. Preceding parts of the series can be found here.

INTERVIEWS

In this interview, Roma, a member of the Kaimur Kshetra Mahila Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Samiti, a land rights movement in Uttar Pradesh, talks about why it refuses to accept DFID funding and the compromises made by other groups that have accepted it.

Richard Whittell: The DFID lists ‘civil society’ among its partners in India and argues that by working with civil society groups it can give poor people a voice and help them in advocating their rights. As part of this approach, the department has given £25 million of British aid to the Poorest Areas Civil Society (PACS) Programme, which it says is partnering with civil society in India to improve the uptake of rights and entitlements by women and socially excluded communities. Do you want the DFID’s money?

Roma: No, we don’t need that funding. Why should we need it? Through the kind of struggle that we are in, women have taken possession of many acres of land, thousands of acres of land, and we didn’t have any funding. They [the women] are coming with their own conviction that the land is theirs and it cannot be traded, it is not a commodity, it cannot go to companies. So they are recapturing their lost political space and they are raising their own resources. They are saying if we have land we can raise everything for ourselves: food security will be there, we can look after our education, our health, our water, sanitation, everything. And for that we don’t need any funding.

So why they are coming and funding women’s groups I don’t understand. And groups should not take that kind of funding. It’s really a trap. If we get into that trap we lose our struggle and our political movement also.

It must be very tempting to take the money given by agencies such as the DFID?

Yes, we are always in crisis! But one has to see it in a very long term perspective. What do we want to achieve? If we have come out of our homes, and we have dedicated ourselves to work for a social cause then we have to leave something. And there are resources within the people;[…] we got our independence, there was no funding agency – there was no DFID! It was all people’s struggle. It was a mass upsurge. And this money that is coming in, [it] neutralises all these kinds of movements. […I]t’s a big trap.

Can you give us an example of how people’s movements are neutralised by this type of funding?

So, for example, there was a big land rights march to Delhi organised by groups funded by the DFID and with the DFID’s money. Land is, of course, a very big issue and people are fighting to reclaim their lost land, after displacement by feudalism, by capitalism. Even for building up our public sector units, people are being displaced. They are being reduced to wage labourers.

We were involved in the initial planning for this march but when we came to know of the participation of the DFID we were really not very interested because the land struggle in our country is of a very different nature and it has a lot of unsolved questions that we need to answer. For example, the agrarian reform question – the question of radical agrarian reform – which will not only concern land but also water and the forests. These areas were totally uncovered, and [yet] agrarian reform needs to be talked about.

We had a very uncomfortable feeling. Then when it started the organisers had a meeting with the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, who himself is a former World Bank guy. Normally movements don’t discuss with the government before starting an agitation because the question then comes: who gave you the mandate to talk to the government?

So, the march happened and was very impressive. People were coming because they really needed land. They were joining in struggles and were craving for land. But after the march it was announced there would be a land commission. We think it’s a big hogwash because having a land commission means you have centralised control and we already have many problems with this. At the same time as this land commission was started we had one quite radical act: the Scheduled Tribes Forest Dwellers Recognition of Rights Act, which was talking about community ownership of land. But the Prime Minister did not talk about that and did not talk about implementing that act so until now the lands are not being allotted [in accordance with] that act.

[T]his creates a lot of questions in our mind and these limits were why funding was coming, why a lot of money is coming. You are talking about a land commission but there is a corporate sector taking huge amounts of land and making them into tax-free Special Economic Zones, and then our act is there but not getting implemented. So there is all this complexity and you know we really doubt the intention of the government.

But most of all we will not need funds from the DFID to launch this struggle. The DFID, plays a devastating role which is anti-people, and anti-poor. We don’t need its money. For example, people came to a demonstration today. Some 400 people came without a ticket for the train. They had their badges, that was their ticket; and [it is] by [their] rights [that] they came. It is our right to travel because our demands are not met. In a democratic country our rights have not been given so that’s why we are travelling. Why would we need the DFID’s money?

But wouldn’t funding help your organisation do even more than it is doing now?

If money comes in we will lose our agenda. We will sit in air-conditioned rooms and talk big about poverty, hunger and food security. But people come to demonstrate in the scorching heat, they come with their own money, their own resources because they want to bring change [to] their lives and [to] the mindset of the ruling class.

They get political sensitisation, so they go back and start working. They go back with the knowledge that a lot of people are with them. Poverty is a global issue. If you come to talk to anybody you will come to know that they do not feel they are alone. Many people are with them fighting against poverty. So they go back and they fight for political issues and political rights, and whenever people come to Delhi they struggle for their land rights. The women especially, they form groups, they organise themselves and they identify which land is theirs and go and take possession.

We need money and all, but we know that funders like the DFID will not let us raise the right questions because it is not in their interest. They will put their conditions and all, and say do this, do that, otherwise they will take away the funding. They make us dependent on the funds so no-one launches any struggle. No-one is tempted to get funds and live in a very comfortable lifestyle.

People should not take funding. We feel very strongly that people’s movements should not go to these funding agencies like the DFID, USAID, and so on. There is a big list [of such funders]! We have to raise our own resources. Definitely in some places we need money, of course, but we will take money according to our conditions. But not from the DFID, otherwise we will end up in air-conditioned rooms talking about the struggles.

The money the DFID is giving is British aid, and is being given in the name of the British people, most of whom agree that Britain should be giving aid. What do you say to them?

We want to convey there is no fight between the people of India and the people of the UK.

Neither are they aware of the condition of India and nor are we aware of who is behind the DFID. If ordinary UK citizens are not aware what the DFID is doing then there needs to be a dialogue The whole of the media, the government are trying to suppress this dialogue. Dialogue from people to people doesn’t happen anywhere so there is confusion on both sides. We should have a direct dialogue, a people to people dialogue. Who is giving the money? Who is using the money? How are they using it and what is our reaction? What is our criticism about that and why don’t we want to take it? That needs to be communicated.

—–

In this concluding interview, Madhuri Krishnaswammy of the Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan (JADS) talks about how they cannot be helped by the DFID and discusses the need for international solidarity that is not mediated by the DFID or NGOs.

Richard Whittell: The head of the DFID in India said its funding for civil society aimed “to help Indian civil society organisations assist people in the poorest and most backward districts of India to realise their rights more effectively and in a sustained manner”. What do you think about organisations like the DFID funding civil society organisations?

Madhuri Krishnaswammy: It’s a bad idea. “Poverty and backwardness” are consequences of 200 years of territorial imperialism, followed by 60 years of neo-imperialism and a “development” model that has allowed the west and local elites to continue to control and exploit our resources.

Agriculture controlled by the agribusiness corporations, the squeezing of rural resources to subsidise industry, massive displacement and pauperization by industrial/pro-rich infrastructural projects are the main reasons for “poverty and backwardness”. The DFID, along with other “aid” agencies actively promotes this model of “development”, which might be more accurately called a model of expropriation, or – more simply – theft. The DFID is part of the problem and it is outrageous hypocrisy for it to pretend to be part of the solution. They tie you up and burgle your house through the back door and then arrive at the front door with much fanfare to provide a few sops as “relief”!

It’s a mystery to us how the DFID helps people “realize their rights more effectively in a sustained manner”. Every time the people try to realize their rights and protect their livelihood there is a police crackdown. DFID projects like the Madhya Pradesh Rural Livelihoods Project don’t even scratch the surface of poverty. They don’t address any real need and don’t aim at any fundamental change. All they do is throw some money about, most of which is grabbed by project staff and local elites which further fuels a deeply entrenched nexus of corruption and violence. At the very best, they give a few individuals a little support and send everyone else in the community scrambling and quarrelling for the crumbs. Our members are in constant conflict with the project because there is no transparency or accountability in the implementation. Where there is no conflict, it is because the project is considered irrelevant to people’s lives.

Civil society organizations funded by the DFID or any such funding agency become complicit in the continuing exploitation of working people and the plunder of their resources. Imperial plunder is not possible without buying up the ruling class of colonized societies. So, such funds are in essence the price of silence.

Could you give us an idea of what the Jagrit Dalit Adivasi Sangathan is and how it works?

Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan (JADS) organizes tribal people (marginal farmers and wage workers) to struggle for their livelihood rights and their right to dignity and for social justice. It is something like a trade union and is a membership based organization, though unlike a trade union it does not focus specifically on “trade” or economic issues, but is a community organization that addresses a wide range of issues: wages, land and forest rights, health, education, community control over development programs, alcoholism, violence against adivasis, anti-women customs, reafforestation, non-industrial farming etc. In other words, issues arising from the community’s interface with the state as well as internal issues of the community.

JADS has primarily been a movement for the right to dignity. It has been very successful in curbing the earlier violence against adivasis by state agencies and local elites. Our people have recovered control over forests that they had lost under British rule and we have made some significant gains on the wage front. Mainly, what the organization has done is allow adivasis to recover their self confidence as a people, and to run their own lives. However, the question of poverty, of the invisible enemy which is a faceless system is still out there. As the organization matures, there is a growing realization that we need to reach out to other movements and organizations to try and build common struggles.

Members in a village elect a village committee. The village committees constitute area committees. The area committees send members to the district committee. The district committee leads the organization. Decisions are taken at weekly meetings of the village and area committees, and monthly meetings of the district committee. At present, one-third to half the committee members are women (hopefully more in the future).

Funding is through membership fees, though we do get occasional contributions from individuals. We do not have any institutional funding. We are able to manage very well with this.

How would you be affected if you decided to take funding from the DFID?

Not just from the DFID. I think it would be a disaster if we were funded by any funding agency (Oxfam, Action Aid, etc.). The organization would be destroyed. The strength of JADS is that it is controlled by the people themselves. It belongs to the community. Its members own it. The organization is as integral to their identity as their family or kin group. The confidence of its members stems from the knowledge that they need be dependent on nobody, that they can run their organization by themselves. We’ve seen what happens when funded NGOs try to “run” communities: the community is kept on a leash, it is drawn into all kinds of projects that are not of its own choosing and have nothing to do with its priorities. Projects are started and dropped according to funding exigencies and paid staff can hardly be expected to brave all sorts of state violence to struggle for a just society.

As I said, the DFID wants to give us hand outs while they call the shots, but our people want to control and direct their own lives and that of their community. They don’t want charity. They want resources they can claim as a right.

The DFID presents itself as a link between British people and Indian people, with themselves as the mediators of British people’s charity. Through this process it paints a picture of Britain as a developed country that has become developed through the liberalization and privatization policies that it is encouraging in India. It ignores the history of imperial plunder but also the long history of people’s struggle within Britain that has been central to any progressive developments in this country, such as the welfare state. They also ignore the continued existence of poverty and exploitation within Britain and the continued struggles against this. So I want to ask you your thoughts on this and the potential for people’s organisations in Britain and India to work together in mutual solidarity.

As you said, the prosperity of rich nations and the comparatively comfortable standards of living of the working class are based on imperial plunder. Not on industrial capitalism, which is inherently based on the expropriation and concentration of wealth. But our comprador elites try to sell us the “liberalization-privatization” package saying: ‘look how developed the West has become with this’. They conveniently forget that this prosperity is based on centuries of imperial plunder or that nowhere has capitalism created prosperity without imperialism. Also, industrial capitalism has proved to be ecologically unsustainable, and a cancer that is consuming the planet. Why should we have any more of it?

Our elites also want us to forget that as a result of long struggles of the working class in the industrialized countries, they have had fairly sturdy welfare states, with public systems of health, education, strong labour laws, etc. This too has been crucial to the relative prosperity of the working class in these countries. How are poor countries supposed to “develop” without these? The tax to GDP ratio in India (despite the rapidly escalating number of millionaires and very rich) is around 18% which is much lower than the Scandinavian countries at around 45-50% and even the USA at 25% (I don’t know how it stands for Britain). The tax subsidy to the corporate sector over the past two years has been almost 5 times the social sector spending.

The attack on the welfare state and escalating aggression and theft by big capital is of course a global phenomenon. In India, the DFID, World Bank, Asian Development Bank and their various ramifications are centrally behind the push to completely dismantle public systems of health, education, food security, water, electricity, and throw our people completely to the mercy of markets controlled by big capital. There is a drive to amend labour laws and make them more pro-capital, while 93% of the workforce is in the unorganized sector (that is, they are completely unprotected) and the casualisation of labour is growing. Also, a much trumpeted “Second Green Revolution” which aims to bring agriculture under the complete control of global agribusiness is already underway.

Meanwhile, people are losing their land, water sources and forests to industry. When they resist, they are beaten, raped, killed, their homes are razed and their land is forcibly occupied. Very large sections of the country are now in a state of war. Activists and intellectuals who protest this are being arrested for waging war against the state.

So since we are all being beaten by the same stick it not only makes sense for us to come together, but in fact this is an urgent necessity. There should be no question of our solidarity being mediated by the DFID or NGOs, since these are part of the system that we have to fight.

But there are possibly some obstacles. Your people seem to have accepted the premise of industrial capitalism, while many of ours are questioning these premises. This is a problem we face in building solidarity with urban Indian working class organizations as well. And then, there is the whole history of imperialism which is still alive and growing stronger. We need to forge links across the imperial divide and to forge links based on a common understanding of how imperialism works and what has been its history. It can and must be done, but requires a lot of sensitivity and hard work.

The other problem is that all of us have to break out of a long history of economism, of our own specific bread-and-butter struggles. Being mired in these hinders our understanding of the big picture, of the commonality of our struggles. We need to develop a much more complex and nuanced common understanding of a shared vision of a just society and how to work towards it, how to deal with conflicting immediate interests.

There is also the problem of lack of information and unfortunately the NGOs control information flows. We really know so little about each other and really need to find more effective ways of transcending cultural and language barriers.

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Each part of this series has been sent to the DFID for a response. We have yet to receive a reply, save for a single email acknowledging receipt of one of our emails. See also:

Dodgy Development: Films and interviews challenging British aid in India

Dodgy Development V: Power to the people? May 05, 2010

Dodgy Development IV: ‘A DFID colony’ May 05, 2010

Dodgy Development III: A DFID Education April 09, 2010

Dodgy Development II: Smile for the camera February 25, 2010

Dodgy development: DfID in India January 28, 2010

The post DFID in India VI: False promises appeared first on Corporate Watch.

In the last ten years, the British government has given £200 million in aid to the north-eastern state of Orissa. This aid has been conditional on the government of Orissa agreeing to undertake, with the Department for International Development (DFID) and the World Bank, “a program to reform the business and direction of government.”* In this fourth part of the Dodgy Development: DFID in India series, through a film and two transcribed interviews, we see the wider effects of British aid and hear from people who are refusing to leave their lands to the South Korean steel company, POSCO, one of the many multinational mining companies that have come to the state following the DFID-initiated reforms.

* From the Aide Memoire of the World Bank and the DFID’s Technical Economic Mission to Orissa, May 8th-13th 2000

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Sudhir Pattnaik is the editor of the Oriya magazine Samadrushi, a political fortnightly which has reported and examined Orissa’s reform programme supported by British aid. Here he talks about the DFID’s influence in the state, its role in the opening up of the state to multinational mining companies and the resistance these reforms have provoked.

Richard Whittell: The DFID says all its policies are developed in tandem with the Government of Orissa, and that they, with the World Bank, work in partnership together. Their country plan for India described its support as “providing funding directly to state budgets in support of broad programmes of core budgetary, governance and sectoral reforms within a sustainable fiscal framework.” They have funded Government of Orissa projects and programmes in health, education, public sector reform, livelihoods and many other sectors. How influential is the DFID in Orissa?

Sudhir Pattnaik: We call it a DFID colony. The common saying is that the DFID is into everything that concerns the governance of the state of Orissa. In every sector you will find the presence of the DFID. “this comes from the DFID” is the standard response you get from bureaucrats. I even knew someone very high up in the Vigilance Department, at the rank of Inspector General. He was sharing with us, that at the beginning of every week he gets a memo saying the DFID wants this or that.

This is not acceptable to anybody who has a sense of democracy. We do not accept a foreign government department coming here and dictating and influencing government departments to do this and to do that.

Do you have any examples of this?

Their support for the whole industrialisation process, for example. The DFID and the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) together conducted many consultative workshops and prepared a blueprint for the industrialisation of Orissa. They wrote and funded the 2001 Government’s Industrial Policy Resolution and, with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), they wrote the Government’s 2006 Resettlement and Rehabilitation Policy.

What have been the consequences of this?

The mineral sector has grown enormously. Vedanta, POSCO, Tata, the Jindals; all such companies have come and people are not accepting them or their promises to rehabilitate and resettle people who have to leave their lands for them.

For example, the government is trying to use this Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy [in] the POSCO proposed area, and in the Vedanta one also. They are using it throughout the state. They say it’s a very progressive policy. They say they are doing it with good intentions, to help people rehabilitate after displacement. But people want more. Land [given in return] for land is not [part of] the policy and the government doesn’t have any will to accept a radical rehabilitation policy. This policy doesn’t guarantee land for land but focuses on compensation. For people who are not used to money wages, if you give them Rs500,000 it has no meaning compared to their land.

Suppose I own land worth Rs500,000. I get that from you when you displace me. That ensures I get exactly the market price for my land. Then I go somewhere else and buy another patch and settle down. But when I go to that place, people know I have that money, so immediately the value of the land doubles. I cannot even buy half of the size of the land I used to own.

But don’t people choose to sell their lands voluntarily?

How can it be voluntary? It’s never voluntary. Either you are forcing, alluring or misleading people. It does not take into account the socio-economic profile of the area. For example, let’s say I’m a landlord. I own five acres of land in an area but I live elsewhere. I decide to dispose of my land because I get a great opportunity when the Tata steel company comes. I wouldn’t get such a good price otherwise. So I decide to sell off my land. But in my five acres of land, five different families live. They’ve been cultivating there. If I dispose of my land how will they survive?

Are there any stipulations for people who don’t own land?

There are some but they’re not enough and are not addressing the main issue. The biggest landowner in Orissa is the state. More than 75% of the land in south west Orissa, for example, is government owned.

But the real owners are the tribal people who have been working it for centuries. Because they haven’t had the land titles settled in their favour, the state claims it is the landowner but in actuality the people have owned the land for centuries. Then the state and the companies take over their land. Now their entire livelihood system goes and there is no provision to support that. The DFID’s Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy does not recognise this reality.

And the DFID has funded and provided technical assistance to the expansion of the Hirakud dam. Initially, the plan was to supply water to farmers. But now what is happening? Farmers are not getting water. In 2004, 20,000 acres of land didn’t get water. In 2008, 50,000 acres of land didn’t get water.

Why is this happening? Because Hirakud water is being taken by the mining companies who have come to the state: by Vedanta for its aluminium plant, by the Jindals and by anyone who has an industry in Sambalpur. They have signed a Memorandum of Understanding which says that 478 cubic feet per second of water will be taken from the Hirakud to be given to these companies, which will mean another 50,000 acres of farmers’ lands will be unwatered.

They say that there is enough water from the Hirakud dam to supply to industry and people. People say the reality is they are not getting water. So this is a design to privatise water resources and infrastructure so those who are running mostly extractive industries will benefit.

And, if you come to the core point, what is the DFID’s understanding of development in Orissa? If you see the kind of development happening in Orissa at the moment, it means developing only industries and mineral-based industries. This is further reduced to four major minerals: coal, aluminium, bauxite and iron. In a state where more than 85% of the population live on agriculture, forestry and fisheries resources, do you think only mineral-based industries can be accepted as the model of development?

How many people in the state will benefit from this? All these minerals are water and energy intensive. Which is why the DFID and the World Bank wanted the energy, power and water sector reforms.

And one of the DFID’s first projects in Orissa was the power sector reform, which saw an American company take over part of the distribution supply?

Yes, it was claimed that people here did not have any knowledge or authority about how to reform the power sector so we needed a company to help us. Who decided which company would help? The DFID.

Orissa had a power sector board before the DFID came. Why was that not up to the task of providing electricity?

There was never any need for help from outside; there was knowledge with engineers and technical people guiding the board. But then the board was dismantled and restructured and the supply line decentralised and all this was designed with consultants engaged by the DFID. Decentralisation and privatisation go together. Decentralisation can mean further democratisation but this didn’t happen here. It means giv[ing] the power supply to private companies.

I have seen the reports on the power sector reform and written about it and I think any commerce graduate in accounting can do better accounting than the experts they sent.

What was the process?

The reforms were pushed by the World Bank and the DFID jointly. They dismantled the state electricity board. They created distribution companies. They also privatised the power generation corporation. They invited foreign bidders.

What have the consequences been?

Higher prices, lower returns to the state. The state is paying, people are paying; so who is gaining? The unit cost of electricity is going up and up. These companies are not paying back to the state. Last year, they spent more than Rs100 crore (£14.6 million) from the poverty eradication program coming from the centre to the state to support the power supply distribution.

So, this is ridiculous. Who is gaining? People are not gaining, so what is the meaning of these reforms? This is what people are asking: what is the meaning of the development they are proposing, and should the World Bank and the DFID patronise this? And for whose interest? Certainly not the interest of the state of Orissa.

Was there any resistance to this?

People are opposing mega projects at the local level. In certain areas of the state, such as the areas where the multinationals are trying to displace people, we are getting the real picture of the reforms and people are fighting back.

And there was a campaign against these destructive reforms in 2002 and for two years we campaigned against the World Bank and the DFID. Many organisations came together: progressives, socialist groups, trade unions, mass organisations. It was called the Campaign against Destructive Economic Reforms. All the privatisation attempts we challenged. We courted arrest. When the DFID and the World Bank were sitting with a group of consultants in the Hotel Crown we were demonstrating outside and there was a huge demonstration in front of the DFID office.

What was the response?

They said they weren’t doing anything on their own, that the Orissa State Government had invited them.

But they’re still here?

Yes, and each reform is part of a whole plan. They want to minimise the role of government and maximise the role of private players. It’s not possible to do that directly so you create a process where gradually government’s role is minimised and in come private players.

Where are the politicians and the political parties in this process?

We don’t have political parties. They claim to be political but they don’t try to understand people’s problems. They are not in tune with people. They only come out during election times and there is no difference between the ruling parties and the opposition. They are all the same. Nobody expects them to play a significant role so in mainstream politics and you don’t find anybody who is opposing this development paradigm. The left is opposing it but they don’t have a proper base.

In the last sixty years no political party has really thought about how to develop the state. Therefore anyone can come with a bag of dollars and say, ‘Do this and we’ll help you’. And many NGOs also attended the consultation sessions they had for these reforms.

Which NGOs?

Those NGOs that do not have any record of working with the poor. There are maybe a few NGOs that are critical, but one or two NGOs raising their voices doesn’t have any real significance. Ultimately, in the proceedings you don’t see any dissenting voices– it looks like they are all in unison. If there are exceptions they don’t get a seat at the table.

Mostly, the NGOs are with the state. Mostly, they are quite comfortable with the state and they don’t raise any critical questions. Some of them have been kicked out and blacklisted because they raised critical questions. ‘If you are not with us, you are with our enemies,’ that kind of thing.

So, should the DFID have played such a role in Orissa?

If the DFID hadn’t had a role, nothing worse would have happened.

But isn’t there an argument that says even if the DFID isn’t promoting the best policies, nonetheless money given by the British Government is providing money for things like healthcare that, given the lack of will of the main political parties, wouldn’t otherwise exist?

I think if you’re putting money in the wrong way it doesn’t make a good impact. For example, in health sector development they are often providing for infrastructure that isn’t being used, so what is the point in putting money in? It requires a social plan but there isn’t one. Health was never a priority sector for this state government. When somebody comes with a big money bag and says ‘I will support this’, the government will, of course, say, ‘Yes’. I’ll tell you one example. I was invited by a committee to inspect the city’s main hospital. I went there to see and discuss it with the chief medical officer. He took us to see the intensive care unit. It’s supposed to be the most active and dynamic unit. When we approached the unit, we saw a cat sleeping. We went in and saw six beds and life support units but there was no-one using them. All this equipment was bought because companies had been contracted for it, but there was no manpower to operate the machineries. He said the government wasn’t thinking about how to run it. And this is happening in all other areas. When the DFID and World Bank come in, the only concern of the state government is to buy equipment.

The Department for International Development is part of the British Government and foreign aid is presented very positively and is seen to be doing good.

Similar perceptions exist about our government. We Indians feel very proud that our government gives money to some smaller south Asian countries. The kind of damage they are doing we don’t take into account. But if governments and the people are genuinely interested to serve another community, the support must be totally unattached and unconditional. The most important thing is whether that state has a plan to develop itself.

I put this question to a government minister. I said try to recollect any time in the past when you have sat for two days to think about the state and how to develop it. He said they’d never done that. So if you’ve never thought about it, how can you have a plan? I don’t think it’s acceptable. In a democracy you have to plan from below and that is not happening.

Would that be possible with foreign aid?

Foreign aid should not be in the picture at all. In certain areas, if you lack resources maybe you could think about it. But have you explored all the resources at your disposal? Look at these mining companies that are coming in – they will pay a tiny amount of tax to the state on the resources they mine then sell. If any government did that, no funds would be required from outside. They are looking for the easy way out with foreign aid.

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Abhay Sahoo is a leader of the people’s campaign fighting South Korean steel company POSCO in its attempts to displace people from their lands to mine the iron ore that lies beneath. He was interviewed in the village of Dhinkia in eastern Orissa. Richard Whittell: Why are you fighting to stop POSCO coming here?

Abhay Sahoo: As everyone knows in the year of 2005, on 22nd June, the Orissa State Government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the company POSCO, of South Korea, to set up a steel mill, with investment of Rs 52,000 crore (approximately £7 billion).

Since then the people of the proposed area – in the three areas of Dhinkia, Gadkujang and Nuwagaon in the district of Jagatsinghpur – have been conducting this resistance struggle against the POSCO steel mill, and we have formed the POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (POSCO Resistance Struggle Committee), of which I happen to be the chairman, and have been conducting this battle against POSCO and safeguarding our motherland and fertile soil.

You see, we are not against industrialisation but industrialisation at the cost of a guaranteed agricultural economy. This area is a coastal area with very sweet sand, underground sweet water and it is full of sand dunes. The coast of the Bay of Bengal has a very special kind of sandy soil. People have been growing betel vine there which happens to be a most profitable item of agriculture and it is an employment generating agriculture. It gives a very handsome income to the cultivator’s family, and provides both direct and indirect employment. So people do not want to part with the betel vine cultivation. In addition, it is producing foreign currency for the state exchequer as it is an item of export. Apart from betel vine, people have cashew nuts which are also profitable items and apart from everything else, people have a very dense forest and a very beautiful ecology.

So, the people of the area have been struggling tooth and nail and heart to safeguard their motherland and fertile soil. It will be a very serious ecological catastrophe. Not only that,If the forest is not there, it will lead to more problems. The thousands of fishermen here depend on the sea mouth through which the entire surplus water is being drained. They catch fish there. And the paddy lands belonging to thousands of agricultural families will be submerged in water. And once the forest is gone, the sand dunes will be gone. There will be no sand dunes. It is the forest and the natural processes which have made the high sand dunes, not the man.

But the other side of the coin is that the company, in connivance with the administration, has imposed violence many times on the peaceful protestors against POSCO. We call this state-sponsored violence.
Do you have any evidence for these allegations of violence?

On 29th November 2007, the anti-POSCO people were on strike at the main entry point to the district. Hundreds of men and women were there, democratically and peacefully protesting against the POSCO officials. But POSCO hired anti-socials. Their officer, who was a senior civil servant, hired the anti-socials who took the help of the little pro-POSCO camp in the area. The district administration also extended its help and together they blasted seven bombs at the peaceful strikers.

Many innocent men and women were injured. Still people are suffering from those injuries in this village. And, as Dhinkia has become the bastion of the anti-POSCO struggle, as many as 450 men and women here have been implicated in more than 90 false legal prosecutions. For me, though I am from this block and this is my area of operation, I have been underground and unable to go to my native village and see my family for three years. Many of the anti-POSCO leaders have been underground for three years.

POSCO is trying to sabotage the movement, they are trying to suppress the movement. They have hired goons and anti-socials, they have started beating the anti-POSCO fighters, they have looted the anti-POSCO fighters’ houses and they have done many injustices to the anti-POSCO families.

In one thing POSCO has been successful and that has been in creating a pro-POSCO camp. They have politicised the struggle, they have tried to disrupt and they have tried to break the struggle.

But the more they have tried to break the struggle, the more people have become united because they have such affection for their own livelihood. There is a historic and dialectical relationship between life and livelihoods and our struggle is based on a scientific analysis of the livelihood aspect of this locality. So apart from everything, our struggle has withstood the situation The war is young.

After four months the Orissa Chief Minister and the POSCO chief announced they were to lay down their foundation stone on the 1st April 2008. On that day the patriotic forces from across the country were invited to be united and we broke all barricades erected by the police. So, the anti-POSCO people have come to the limelight and taken control of every village again. If they come into this area they will face mass obstruction and mass demonstrations.

Now the government has suspended many anti-POSCO fighters who have been in government service. In Dhinkia, they have suspended one central government employee who was a postmaster and they have suspended a high school teacher. They have taken revenge on anti-POSCO families and have started an economic blockade. They have stopped supplying commodities, such as kerosene, sugar and rice.

So these are the things we are facing. But, to achieve our objective and to champion the cause of the people, we must lead this struggle to its logical conclusion until POSCO is forced out.

What has the DFID’s role been in this?

One thing is very clear: the DFID is dictating the principles and the rules of the state government. The DFID is putting tremendous pressure on the government to invite the multinational companies and private companies, to go for the private sector, domestic or foreign. And the DFID is very keen on privatising all the government and public sectors.

What is your opinion of the proposals contained in the DFID-funded Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy?

As you know, the state government has adopted the Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy 2006, which it claims is the best one, and POSCO has announced some additional packages.

The policy means that one who loses the homestead and agricultural land will be given due compensation for the recorded land as per the value of local area and he will be given, if displaced, three rooms for his family and will be given employment in the company or, if he doesn’t have requisite qualifications, will be given compensation.

There are many people living here who do not have formal property rights to the land they are living on and are technically living on government land. What will they get from the policy?

They won’t get anything. The company says the government is the owner, so there is nothing to give the people who are living on the land. And to satisfy people, POSCO has announced an additional package of Rs 6000 per decimal of land. But that is nothing for the betel cultivator and people are not interested.

So, if the Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy was implemented, people who do not have their own land would not be compensated?

You see one thing. You can come to a very scientific conclusion if you know the structure of the land. POSCO is to acquire 4,004 acres of land. There is a population of 22,000 with 4,000 families. And out of the 4,004 acres, 3,566 acres are government land!

The 2006 Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy is an anti-people and anti-development policy. And the state government has written it under instruction of the DFID. You see, the Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy is not meeting the demands of the displaced and affected people; the employment aspect, displacement aspect and the compensation for land losers. People are suffering and will suffer more if they accept the Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy 2006.

The company has not yet acquired an inch of land and we have refuted this Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy, which has been formulated in connivance with the DFID. It is not a welfare policy for the people. And our movement is 100% opposed to this policy. Not only is this the policy of the state government, but it is also the policy of the DFID.

After this interview, one man was killed in clashes with Pro-POSCO supporters. Abhay Sahoo was arrested and held for ten months on a variety of charges. He was recently released on bail.

POSCO has not yet been able to start construction. See http://stoposco.wordpress.com/ for updates.

Please also see the interview with Orissa teachers’ union secretary Abani Baral in www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=3550>Part III of Dodgy Development for more background to the DFID’s entry into Orissa.

See also:

Dodgy Development: Films and interviews challenging British aid in India

Dodgy Development VI: False promises June 25th, 2010

Dodgy Development V: Power to the people? May 05, 2010

Dodgy Development III: A DFID Education April 09, 2010

Dodgy Development II: Smile for the camera February 25, 2010

Dodgy development: DfID in India January 28, 2010

The post Dodgy Development IV: ‘A DFID colony’ appeared first on Corporate Watch.

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The fifth part of Dodgy Development: DFID in India looks at the effects of the UK Department for International Development funding on power sector reform in India. The DFID has stated that one of its priorities in India is, “strengthening the capacity of government to develop and implement pro-poor policies”, as “governments have [often] expanded their role so far that they have become ineffective in providing basic services, and have made a disproportionate claim on public resources… The starting point for change has often been the need to reduce subsidies in the power sector”. As a consequence the DFID has given more than £200 million to the Governments of Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh to “restructure their power industries and seek greater efficiency”.

The following film, shot in affected areas of Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, and interviews with the Secretary of the Madhya Pradesh power sector employees’ union and a Member of the Madhya Pradesh State Parliament demonstrate how British aid has funded reforms which have pushed prices up by more than 200% and increased disconnections and power cuts. Moreover, these reforms have been implemented beyond the scrutiny of parliament and elected representatives and have ignored employees whilst giving the major part of British aid to management consultants.

Vinay Pandey is the Convenor of the Madhya Pradesh State Electricity Employees & Engineers Coordination Committee, an umbrella body of 17 unions and workers bodies. Here he explains the practical consequences of the reforms to the power supply in Madhya Pradesh and describes how the suggestions and ideas of the employees have been excluded in favour of those of management consultants brought in by the DFID.

Richard Whittell: In its project memorandum regarding support for the Madhya Pradesh Power Sector Reforms, the DFID says the goal of its funding is to “support the development of an efficient, accountable and financially viable power sector in Madhya Pradesh”.* Has this goal been achieved?

Vinay Pandey: At the state level as well as at the national level, through the All India Power Federation, we feel that the whole reform process has been misguided. We feel that after a decade of reforms the situation has deteriorated.

The reform process was guided by the Asian Development Bank, which provided a loan, and the consultants brought in through the DFID and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). These consultants failed to take into account the real ground situation and it has moved to a situation where electricity is being sold as a commodity instead of a social service.

It is being charged on the basis of cost of supply when it should be on the basis of capacity to pay. A precondition of the loan was that the cross-subsidy element had to be eliminated. In a country like India, social and economic disparity is high and the poor farmer cannot be expected to pay on the basis of cost of supply. So it has created more problems for the common people.

Why is charging on the basis of cost of supply more expensive for farmers?

When a commodity is charged on the basis of cost of supply, the electricity is supplied in bulk to the big consumers such as the industrial sector. For any product the cost of bulk supply is much less than the cost of retail supply. In Madhya Pradesh, the geographical spread is high and farmers are scattered throughout the state. Low tension lines feed the farmer. On the low tension lines the technical losses are high. So it follows the law of physics. The law of physics says that as the low tension line length increases the technical losses will be higher. This resultantly implies that the farmers and the domestic consumers will have to be charged higher.**

This was a precondition of the reforms that were brought in, that were supported and advocated by the consultants engaged by agencies such as the DFID. And they created the problem. It is creating a rift within the society. We have repeatedly pleaded that in a country like India where the growth of the common person is very important, and the survival of the agriculture sector is the question of the survival of the farmer, electricity has to be treated as an essential service. It is the duty of the state. We cannot leave it to the profit earning organisations; we cannot apply commercial principles to this. We have to decide at some point in time whether it is a social obligation on the state or it is a commercial entity. And we just cannot support the idea that it can be run as a commercial entity like in developed countries because there you have life support systems; there are systems already in place that support a poor person in case of need regarding health, education and the basic livelihood concepts. And if we charge electricity on these rates, this will create a catastrophe.

The DFID argued that the reforms would cut revenue losses and theft, which would lead to better services for everybody.

We just don’t subscribe to that theory. The basic problem is that we are suffering from lack of generating capacities. For years, because of these reform programmes and because the conditions attached to them said that no additional generating capacity would be brought into the system, now we have reached a point that prior to reforms, there were two hours of power cuts but after a decade of reforms we are now facing six hours of power cuts. It is a question of investment and investment in the right direction.

And that has created a distortion. We repeatedly pleaded and we launched a campaign. We succeeded in bringing out the facts but even with all our efforts the augmentation of the generating capacity was hampered by this negativity and that is causing the real problem. Earlier we were generating more power, power equal to our demand but now we are ranked as power deficient.

When we are power deficient a state has to make an expenditure ten times the generating cost. So on the financial front it has created a very huge loss position. The consultants say that because you are in loss you shouldn’t go for investment in the generation capacity. But the real thing is that until and unless you make investment in the generating sector, this loss position can never be addressed. We have gone down the wrong path and therefore as the reforms progressed the power situation in the state has deteriorated and the financial position has also deteriorated. Both things have happened simultaneously. Again the consultants could not assess the situation in the Indian context.

So the employees are getting less pay, people are forced to pay higher tariffs and power cuts have gone up. So what sort of reform has taken place? And for whom has it taken place?

One of the first reforms was the ‘unbundling’ of the electricity supply – splitting the electricity board into separate transmission, generation and distribution companies – which the DFID argued would make it more efficient and more responsive to consumer demands, and help to “prepare the new sector entities for a more competitive and business-like environment”. Has that happened?

Why is it needed to unbundle an electricity board? Hewlett Packard is integrating its business with Compac because they say economies of scale will help. It will help with reducing cost. It will help with providing better services to the consumer. So why instead of integration we are going towards disintegration? The entity which was looking after the generation, transmission and distribution has been forced to ‘unbundle’ in the name of reform, in the name of aid, in the name of grants, in the name of loans, the preconditions of which were specified by these agencies: the Asian Development Bank, the DFID or the Canadian Development Agency. Everybody knows that in today’s world competitiveness goes down if you are a smaller sized entity and it is more difficult to survive.

So whether this is being done to provide better services to the consumer or whether it is being done to enable privatisation – so the private bidders can easily take over these companies – is a big question and it has to be answered.

DFID-funded power sector reforms in Orissa led to part of the service being privatised and the DFID’s Project Memorandum for Madhya Pradesh talks of the reforms leading to “a commercially viable power sector, which will be an attractive investment opportunity to the private sector”. Why hasn’t the service in Madhya Pradesh been privatised?

There has been a large opposition from the union and from the people and we are determined that we will do whatever is possible to oppose the privatisation.

Whenever this privatisation comes up it always caters to the ‘creamy layer’. Everyone is interested in entering into the business which is a profit generating business. Everyone is interested in entering to the urban areas, everyone is interested in supplying to the industrial consumers. But who is going to supply power to the poor farmer? Who is ready to supply power to the rural population? And can an organisation, can a country, can a state survive where you have got division between the haves and have-nots in such a situation that the have-nots will not have any electricity? In today’s world, it will not be democratic.

Privatisation of the electricity industry or, for that matter, of any infrastructure for basic essential services becomes a question of privatising the profits and nationalising the losses. That’s not acceptable. We in the National Coordination Committee of the All India Power Federation, the Western India Power Federation, and the Madhya Pradesh Employees Union are opposed to that philosophy.

Even without privatisation there have been demonstrations against the reforms.

One thing is clear: in general if you look to the media reports, if you go and ask any person on the street, people are not as happy as they were in the 1990s. In the 1990s there were no power cuts. The electricity bill was not causing shock to any person but now the electricity bill generates shock. There are power cuts. People are not satisfied with the overall situation and there can be no denial of the fact. So the test is on the common street. It may be true that people may not be aware of the role of one agency, the DFID or the Asian Development Bank, or this and that, but overall it has generated more dissatisfaction than satisfaction.None of the agencies, I don’t think, have been able to earn appreciation for their role. Until and unless they change their basic paradigm, they will not.

In state after state this has happened and the problems of the infrastructure, particularly electricity, have caused turbulence. It is an issue which affects every common person and therefore it affects the political fabric of our political system. It is a big political issue, it is a big economic issue, it cannot be denied and therefore we plead that managing the sector should be the responsibility of those who know the sector. We cannot go to the consultants who don’t know the sector. A blind person cannot guide me. But we are sorry to say that the prescriptions of these agencies like the DFID were just like that.

Much of the British aid money went to consultancy companies, including Ernst and Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG, for “technical assistance”. What kind of expertise did these consultants provide?

The biggest contribution was in their ability to generate presentations. Nice presentations, nice decorative plastics, PowerPoints and a huge compilation of reports. Report after report after report. The whole grant has been for the consultants, by the consultants and of the consultants.

There is a basic question which has come up before the reform process, whether it was intended in the right direction; whether those who were suggesting, who were guiding, who were giving the consultancy, whether they had any real assessment of the ground situation. We feel very [keenly] that most of the consultants who came into the process, who jumped on the bandwagon, didn’t have any real assessment of the ground situation.

The employees who devoted their lives, who served in the sector, who knew the ground realities very well; they were never taken into account, they were never taken into confidence. Their views were never taken into consideration.

So you were not consulted by the DFID?

No. No-one directly interacted and, as far as I know, none of the unions were taken into confidence. Some of the consultants interacted but [interacting] and listening are two different things.

The employee’s perspective is very interesting. Everywhere it is said that if you are running an organisation until and unless you take the employees into confidence, until and unless you address the human resources, you cannot succeed in anything. And we are unable to understand why in this whole process, at no point in time, it has been attempted to take the employees into confidence.

In 2004, we carried out a survey – it was the biggest survey conducted of electricity employees and engineers in India – and about 1,000 employees participated from headquarters. Even at the headquarters, less than 2% of people said they knew the objectives of the reforms. 98% were not sure what the purpose was of the reforms that were taking place. Almost three quarters of employees were of the opinion that these reforms are not guided by the Government, or by the needs of the common people but by the agencies from the UK and the Asian Development Bank. So if that is the feeling it raises alarm bells.

What were the effects of the consultants’ recommendations?

At the end of the day, when we sit down and assess the situation we are unable to see that anything positive has come out of the whole thing. Rather, we are seeing in the neighbouring state of Chhattisgarh where there was no such programme, where they were supposed to work on their own, they have been able to perform better, their systems have been strengthened. Because they have done it on their own.

In almost all the fields, whether it was human resources, or whether it was information systems, what we have seen is that where the consultants were not there, they were able to implement good systems. So, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and if the end consumer is not satisfied, if the employees are not satisfied, if the electricity utility which is being assisted is not able to generate profits, then where is the pudding?

It has created more hindrance or, you can say, more delayed procedures than anything else. Out of this whole consultancy assignment, or reform assignment, the beneficiaries were the consultants. No-one else. It puts a big question mark on the process, on the implications and on the basic objectives of the process. It raises a question mark to the intention of these agencies. We have reason to doubt their intentions and their objectives. And unfortunately no-one has ever come to answer these questions.

What has been the effect on employees?

There is a lot of resentment. As part of the reform process, one of the consultants came in and made the recommendation that the number of employees was too high and should be cut by half.

They submitted that report but it was challenged by the unions. The logical data was presented, which shows that it is not possible under the geographical conditions of the state of Madhya Pradesh to cut the number of employees and sustain provision. You cannot say that if one driver is needed for a bus then only one tenth of a person will be needed for driving a car. You need one driver for a car also and even if you have a bicycle you need one person.

They took an algebraic equation from a metro city like Bangalore, where there are big apartment blocks and so on, and they said that for this amount of population there is one employee. You cannot apply that algebra to the rural population, where the demographic pattern is too scattered. The population density is one tenth of Bangalore. In some pockets it is one hundredth of Bangalore so that equation cannot be applied – it is too simplistic to make such an assessment.

But once the report got to the government, even with all this opposition, it definitely hampered the process of recruitment and in ten years of consultancy no fresh recruitment took place. Ultimately it has resulted in a situation where we need 70,000 employees to serve the state but we are forced to serve with 52,000 employees, and they have an average age of 50. So the quality of service definitely deteriorates.

Ultimately, even with all the technology, all the software and computers, […] the electricity supply needs personal care. To rectify a wrong connection you need someone. The computer cannot do that job. And therefore this aspect is hurting the consumer as well as the employees.
* All quotes in the interview are from the DFID Project Memorandum, Support for the Reform of the Power Sector in Madhya Pradesh

** “The present tariff for domestic and agricultural (low tension) consumers is more than 3 times that of 2001 (i.e. increase of more than 200%), while that for industrial consumers is only about 1.2% times (increase of 20%)” – A decade lost; what’s next? Looking back at power sector restructuring in Madhya Pradesh, Nikit Abhyankar, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XL, No 48, November 26, 2005)
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Dr Sunilam is a Member of the Legislative Assembly of Madhya Pradesh with the Janata Dal Party. In this interview, conducted in Delhi, he describes how development programmes funded by British aid have been kept from scrutiny by elected representatives in the state parliament or local assemblies.

Richard Whittell: Does a state like Madhya Pradesh, which has high levels of poverty, need the help of the British Government’s Department for International Development (DFID)?

Dr Sunilam: For development projects, definitely investment is required but the point is when you are working in a democratic system you need to discuss each and every thing, and these issues have not been discussed in the state assembly. I have been a member of the legislature for the last nine and a half years and there has been no discussion. I have asked many questions about the impact and the conditions attached and I could not get a single reply from the government.

For example?

Recently the agencies have given Rs900 crore (£130 million) for the water reforms and I asked what the conditions attached to it were, whether public taps would be removed, whether the cost of water would be increased, and what would happen to the employees who are working for the water now and so on, but they never replied. They even said there was a draft proposal about the water reforms which had been prepared by the DFID and not by the people’s elected representatives. And when I asked for the draft they would not give it to me.

Who did you ask?

The government.

The DFID flags up accountability and the strengthening of democracy as important parts of its work. According to their country plan for India for example, “across India, decentralisation of responsibilities to the elected government is seen increasingly as a key strategy for improving effectiveness of basic services”.

The panchayats (local assemblies) were not taken into confidence. The representatives of the panchayats at the village level and the district level were not taken into confidence although they have constitutional rights. They talk about decentralisation so they should have taken the panchayats into confidence. It was also never discussed in the state assembly. I have been a member there for nine and a half years – this is my second term – and the DFID’s grants have never been discussed. Any grant you take, its impacts should be discussed.

None of the DFID’s reforms were discussed?

No. Even when I asked many questions about the conditions and what the impact would be they never replied. They just rejected the questions. They have to honour the democratic process and they are not ready to honour it. They are not taking people into confidence. They have their own agenda which they want to implement. That is not acceptable to us.

The DFID’s India plan says, “the DFID can have most impact through genuine partnerships with central and state governments. DFID’s approach is therefore to enter into long-term partnerships with states which are themselves committed to eliminating poverty and are following the kind of policies needed to achieve that goal”. One of its stated priorities is, “strengthening the accountability of government to those it represents”.

If they are not even accountable to the representatives then how can they be accountable to the people?

They have to talk to the representatives. If you are working at the district level or the village level these representatives must be taken into confidence. At least they should have the right to know what is happening and what the impact will be of the whole thing. But nobody knows about it. Nobody knows the figures, how much is coming. Studies that were conducted were not discussed and that is the issue.

Firstly, they have to be accountable to the panchayat representatives and the assembly representatives and the parliament. We have the Panchayati Raj system, so at the village, block and district level everything should be discussed. If nothing is discussed the whole thing is very undemocratic.

But they say a scheme like the Madhya Pradesh Rural Livelihoods Project actually strengthens the Panchayati Raj system through its strengthening of democratic decision making at the local level.

That may be their point of view but if they say they are strengthening the system they should come out with all the facts. And these facts should be discussed democratically in the assembly and district panchayat meetings.

Their reason for working with government is given as, “the best way to provide lasting support for poverty elimination is to help governments formulate good policies and strengthen the effectiveness of their service delivery systems”, and “to strengthen and develop a joint understanding of the development challenges and priorities [DFID faces] in achieving the Millennium Development Goals”.

About these Millennium Development Goals: in Madhya Pradesh, more than 11.5 lakh (1.15 million) people’s names were removed from the list of those people who are below the poverty line and this was done when the DFID was helping them to reduce poverty. When I asked the minister responsible he informally told me that ‘the development agencies, those that are funding us like the World Bank and the DFID, they ask us why our figures were going up. So to reduce the number on papers we cut down the names.’ And this is 11.5 lakh people, more than 1 million people! Their names were removed in Madhya Pradesh.

So I would like to know what exactly they have done on these issues. On every single issue we can talk for hours because we work in the field and know that the situation is worsening, particularly the drinking water situation in Madhya Pradesh. At least at this time if you go around Madhya Pradesh throughout the night you will see people, particularly women, collecting water, throughout the night. It’s a big, big problem in Madhya Pradesh. So what [are] the DFID or the Government of Madhya Pradesh doing for the fulfilment of these Millennium Development Goals?

It’s a question of the flow of capital. Still the flow continues from South to North – you have many figures to prove that – and whatever resources we have they want to capture them. The ultimate aim is privatisation and to capture the natural resources of India. That is the intention, and for that they are lobbying, through the World Bank, through the Asian Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund or through the DFID. It is all the same and that’s why we oppose it.

The DFID funding has been consistent through two different governments – of both the Congress and the BJP parties – in Madhya Pradesh and at the national level it has continued from 1997 through two different governments in the centre. In whose interests is it acting?

They are working in the interests of the companies. They want to privatise the power sector, the health sector and education. The whole idea is to give profits to the companies, particularly the multinational companies.

But we are now seeing a people’s uprising against the liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation process, and such development projects as those of the DFID, which are trying to divide the people and divide the non-governmental organisations that are working with the people. This is not good for the people and is not good for the whole NGO sector because it is being discredited. They are playing into the hands of a few development agencies. Politicians in this country are already discredited, and if this NGO sector or the grassroots movements are also discredited it becomes a big threat to democracy and it will injure it.

Can you give us an example of that?

It is no secret which NGOs are taking money from the DFID. All those NGOs should be accountable to the people but they are not really serving the people at large. They are working against their interests and are working for the companies in the longer run. Because finally in the water sector or power sector, when they say reforms it means that it is being privatised and the profit is going to companies and people will be squeezed.

The DFID is a ministry of the British Government and, in principle, is accountable to British people. What role should the British Parliament be playing in the DFID’s actions?

They talk about democracy and they say they have full faith in the democratic norms, so all these things should be discussed at all levels. These things should be placed before the people, particularly if they are saying they are saving lives. The British Parliament should ensure that all the facts and figures are brought before the people before any project is implemented.

The people of the UK have the right to know what is happening with these projects when they say they are working for the well-being of the people. You know, when it was the British Raj, they also said, ‘We have come to enlighten the people of India, we are here for the wellbeing of the people’. Those who rule or those who want to rule through various development projects or schemes always talk about their good intentions but what is the hidden agenda? That must come in front of the people.
For more information on water and energy reforms in India, please see: www.manthan-india.org/

For a DFID account of the success of the reforms, please see: www.dfid.gov.uk/media-room/case-studies/2009/india-power-reform/ See also:

Dodgy Development: Films and interviews challenging British aid in India

Dodgy Development VI: False promises June 25th, 2010

Dodgy Development IV: ‘A DFID colony’ May 05, 2010

Dodgy Development III: A DFID Education April 09, 2010

Dodgy Development II: Smile for the camera February 25, 2010

Dodgy development: DfID in India January 28, 2010

The post Dodgy Development V: Power to the people? appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Richard Whittell and Eshwarappa M’s study of the British Government’s Department for International Development’s presence in India continues with analysis of its support for education in the country. Interviews with academics, educationalists and teachers, and an accompanying film, show DFID-funded programmes contributing to the decline of public education in India.

FILM: A DFID Education

INTERVIEWS

Professor Anil Sadgopal is the former Dean of Delhi University’s Faculty of Education, a member of various national education commissions and committees* and a founder member of the People’s Campaign for Common School System. In this wide-ranging interview, conducted in his home in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, he talks to Richard Whittell about the impact of education programmes in India funded by British aid, putting them in the context of the education reforms of the last twenty years.

Note: ‘government’ or ‘public’ school denotes state school.

Richard Whittell: The majority of the British Government’s aid to education in India is given to the Government of India’s flagship Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, or Education for All programme, which aims to bring all India’s children into school. By 2011, it will have given more than £350 million to the programme. The British Government’s Department for International Development (DFID) argues that Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan “is proving to be very effective and remarkable progress is being made,” with Gordon Brown saying British aid is enabling “new opportunities for Indian girls and boys”. What has your impression of the programme been?

Professor Anil Sadgopal: Before we start talking about the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, we must first talk about the District Primary Education Programme which came before it. This was a programme partly funded by the World Bank, that started in 1994 and led to a deterioration in the concept of education and the functioning of the education system. The District Primary Education Programme was concerned with setting up what they called a multi-layered school programme.

These parallel layers of schools or educational facilities meant there was a different educational facility for a different segment of society: that means children of parents working in factories will get one quality of school, children whose parents are schoolteachers will get another quality of school, children whose parents are constables or police officers will get another quality of school, and children whose parents are industrialists or political leaders will get another quality of school.

This meant that for the majority of government schools, we had to compromise on the quality of teachers, on the quality of school infrastructure, on the pupil-teacher ratios, on the amount of money each teacher was given for creating teaching aids, on the amount of money each disabled child was given to provide for Braille or for other support systems.

So, by the time the District Primary Education Programme ended we had already diluted all kinds of our norms and standards in school education. In fact, the Government of India was embarrassed to call all these layers schools. In official terminology, even in our union budget, these are now often referred to as education facilities, not as schools.

And the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan started after this?

Yes, it was on this basis that the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan was designed, becoming really operative in the Government’s 10th Five Year Plan from 2002 onwards.

The primary statement of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan was to provide access to schools, alternative schools, educational guarantee centres or to back to school camps, by December 2003 (see the interview with Dr Niranjan Aradhya below for an analysis of these educational facilities). That was the basic statement. It did not say to take all children into regular schools. It has not even aimed at doing that. .

It packaged all the faults of the District Primary Education Programme and created a fresh package, with a lot of fanfare and said again, once again, that we will have gender parity at the end of the project, we will close the social disparity gaps, we will provide education to all Dalits, all tribals, all minorities and we will bring disabled children into our school system.

Nothing of the sort has happened. 52% of India’s children do not complete even eight years of education. And these are Government of India statistics**, which are not really the reality. The reality is much worse. But even the Government of India’s own statistics show that 52% of Indian children drop out before Class 8. 35% of children drop out before Class 5! Among Dalits and tribals, the drop-out rate rises to 70% before Class 8. And it’s the same for minorities and for Muslim children.

And disabled children? Forget what is going to happen to disabled children. We will stop talking about them. The whole idea in Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’s original document was to bring all disabled children to regular, mainstream schools. But today no-one is talking about it, because that will mean a commitment to provide a well trained teacher who is sensitive to a disabled child, who understands sign language, and who can enable the child to use sign language and help a child with Braille education. This would mean more commitment and more finances. All these objectives are not even mentioned anywhere.

And only 5-8% of Dalits, or tribals, or minority children are able to cross Class 12. And why do I talk of Class 12? Because without having a Class 12 certificate today in our economic and social condition, you do not have access to either a job or to any kind of professional, vocational or higher education course.

So, to keep on talking about primary education, when without a Class 12 certificate you cannot get anywhere in this country is blasphemy. What will a child do with a Class 5 certificate? I keep saying to all the government people who are doing this work: if poor parents ask you why their child should go to school, how will you convince them? He or she is keen to send their child to school but they will ask you why they should do it. So that their child will become literate? After your child becomes literate, he or she will become a manual worker, and will not get even minimum wages. For this purpose you want to have five years schooling? The very purpose of schooling is lost and you give no motivation for a poor person to send a child to school. This kind of education leads a child to nowhere.

And in fact the government of India realised this, so the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, which is partly funded by your government, the union budget and the 11th Five Year plan, are no more talking of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan as having an objective of reaching Class 8. They’re not even mentioning that.

They have said that the objective of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan will be to merely enrol children in upper primary schools. Enrol, no more complete education. From completing eight years of schooling by 2010, the objective has been diluted and downgraded to merely enrolling children, and I think by the next targets you won’t even find this word enrolling. This is a DFID-supported programme.

So, I do not know what Prime Minister Gordon Brown and your DFID mean when they say, “Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is proving to be very effective and remarkable progress is being made”. What criteria do they use to judge progress? I do not know.

The British Government’s support for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is part of its commitment to the Millenium Development Goals; number two of which is to “ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.”

With all these things we must be aware of the context in which they are happening. India’s constitution is committed to a minimum of eight years of elementary education, but the District Primary Education Programme meant only five years of schooling. In the Jomtien Declaration – the name given to the document released in 1990 by the World Conference for Education for All, held at Jomtien in Thailand, and funded by the World Bank and UN agencies – the principles of education as enshrined in our constitution had already been diluted. The Jomtien Declaration makes no commitment to eight years of schooling. It makes no commitment to the wider goals of education, that is, to make human beings, or citizens of this country.

All these goals of education were reduced to mere literacy and skill formation in the Jomtien Document. And these very ideas are now part of the Millennium Development Goals. The Millennium Development Goals are a big dilution of our own constitutional commitment. And the economic survey of the Government of India in 2007/8 in fact referred to the Millennium Development Goals but did not refer to the Indian Constitution as a basis of education planning, and that is a total victory for the external agencies in this country.

Why are the Millennium Development Goals a further dilution?

The Millennium Development Goal for education talks of literacy, while our goal is education. They talk of skills, when our constitution’s goal is a democratic, socialist, egalitarian citizen. They talk of only five years of schooling, while our goal is eight years of education. They do not make any commitment to free education and they do not make any commitment to education of equitable quality, which is a very important principle today. The entire Millennium Development Goal for education revolves around literacy and skills. Therefore the Millennium Development Goals cannot be our objective; they cannot be the aim of India’s education. Creating a skilled worker who is literate may be all right for your factories, but it’s not all right for our country. As someone said, India is a nation, not a corporation.

We are a nation, so our education system has to be an education-building system, not a corporation-building system. And these things are very important. People will say this is only rhetoric, but it is not rhetoric. The whole planning is done in this way. The people designing this don’t have any right to keep talking about the Millennium Development Goals, which are such a diluted version of our constitution.

Let me quote some statements made in DFID reviews of its funding to the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to you: “Numbers of out of school children in India have reduced by almost 5 million per year since 2003 across the entire country”.

What reduction are they talking of? You see, in order to prove you are succeeding – and this has been the story even before external assistance in 1993, but now it is really in high decibel – you keep counting children on registers, and if you find a number of children on registers, you say, “Ah, they are there”.

See, enrolment is not equal to attendance, attendance is not equal to learning, and learning is not automatically equal to education. All these things are important. Are these important for British schools or not, I do not know? Or you will be happy having a British child just having her name on the school register? At least in India no educationalist will say enrolment on a register is equal to education.

The UK High Commission in India claims “Drop-out rates have fallen by 4% at the primary stage and 2% points in the upper primary stage.”

See, what is the objective of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan? Is it to keep talking about the reduction of drop-out rates, or was the objective earlier, in all the original documents, even up to 2005, to enable every child in India to complete eight years of schooling? Why is Prime Minister Brown happy without the achievement of these objectives?

Eight years of schooling! Not just literacy. Schooling means geography, history, civics, political science, language education in at least two languages – which means the ability to articulate yourself; language education is not literacy, language education is about knowing your literature, knowing your culture, knowing poetry, fiction – this is what you have to know by Class 8. You have to know how to do algebra and geometry, not just be able to count. You begin to deal with ideas of sets in arithmetic. You have to know about the geography of your country, about Europe, about Africa, about Latin America. You have to be aware of the history of India’s freedom struggle. You have to know about Dr Ambedkar, the great fighter for Dalits: this is education!

And what is the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan doing? It is funding non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to measure the ability to read only one sentence. As if it was an adult literacy programme and not a school education programme. In school education, your whole assessment in Class 8 or Class 5 is now reduced to reading one sentence, or doing some simple two digit multiplication. You are paying NGOs to measure this and they are coming out with results that show the situation is very bad, even with respect to these parameters. Yet Prime Minister Brown is so happy. I do not know what data he is using.

We have lost our vision of education which the Kothari Commission of 1966 tried to give. It was a vision of transforming education into a common school system. We lost that vision with the principle of market economics and the unproven assumption that private capital knows how to run schools better than the government (unproven because the majority of the private schools are run very badly; only high fee private schools are “run well”, if you accept their vision of education).

So, in our country we are now dependent upon short term, temporary schemes and projects, like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. As I told you earlier, since its inception it has undergone a change in its sets of objectives and changes in the strategies. We do not have a vision of educational transformation. We are running schemes and projects and we will never succeed.

The United Nations’ global monitoring report says that even five years of primary schooling will not be achieved in India by 2015. Forget Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’s talk of 2010. I would say the United Nations are being charitable. Look at their reports carefully and you will find that it won’t be possible for the next 30 years under the present set of schemes and projects. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is no different.

As these schemes continue it seems more and more parents are sending their children to low-fee charging private schools. We were talking to a group of parents in a fairly low income area and they were sending their children to private schools, although they said in the past everyone went to government schools. How has this trend developed?

When there has been a deterioration in the quality of the vast proportion of the government school system, it is very easy to understand that poor parents, out of desperation, will look for private schooling. And private schooling has mushroomed in India in the past ten years, precisely because the government school system has declined in quality. And our own administrators, policy makers and political leaders have no problem with it.

The Government of India has decided to promote the public-private partnership mode for developing the public education system also. The 11th Five Year plan document of the Planning Commission and the union budget both refer to public-private partnerships being the primary mode of developing school education. And this is commodification of school education. And one has known earlier of commodification of medical education and management education but commodification of school education is a new phenomenon of the last five to seven years.

And does that also come in Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan?

No, that does not come directly under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, but that plays a part. See, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is a very circumscribed programme, only to promote inadequate schooling for poor children, producing educational facilities the government is too ashamed to even call schools. But outside the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, as the quality deteriorates within it, not only is private schooling coming up, but the government is starting different layers of high quality schooling outside Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. So Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan remains a system of deterioration and if you want to set up a better quality school, whether you are a private company or a government agency, you do it outside Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.

The government is now promoting, in partnership with private agencies, school systems of different kinds across the country. The focus examples are these 6,000 model schools that the Prime Minister said would be built throughout the country. 2,500 out of 6,000 model schools are developed in the public private partnership mode, with the rest to be set up by the government in educationally backward districts. It’s very interesting. If you read between the lines, what does this say?

It says that in educationally backward districts, where private capital will have no advantage and will not try to go, there the government will take care of the high quality model schools, but in the developed districts, public lands and public assets will be handed over to private capital to make profits out of school education. That’s the message coming out; that the public-private partnership mode is a strategy for handing over public assets to private capital.

And with the public-private partnership mode coming into play, there is a loss of the sense of a right to education, or the right to other sectors, such as health or social welfare. As education is commodified you cannot demand it as a right. You are a customer. There is no more entitlement. It is a service, which can be taxed also; you will be charged if you want your children to go to a decent school.

Do I get a better bus service because I pay for it? The bus service in Bhopal is privatised. Look at the state of the buses and the way they work with the passengers. Look at the Blue Line buses of Delhi. They are probably the world’s biggest killers on the road and they get away with every murder they indulge in.

Do we get better water, do we get better electricity because they are privatised? The Delhi electricity rates have sky-rocketed. I used to live in Delhi and the quality of service was better before privatisation. When something went wrong I had a political right to go into the electricity office and demand you either do the right thing or I will do a sit-in. But today it is a corporate office; it is no more a public office.

Look at the larger system today; the central board of examination, the CBSE affiliates private schools and government schools which are run for government employees. The performance of these schools is better than the private fee charging schools. Even today, look at the statistics, you’ll find the top slot will be taken by central government schools run for their employees, not by the private schools.

So, even today the government is running a better school system. In every state in India there is a small category of model schools, which are run by the government at a very high quality level. So, it is a fallacy to claim that when schools are public they are run badly. When the government wants to run a good school system it can do it.

What effect have programmes such as Sarva Shiksha Abihyan had on teachers?

Teachers have been beaten by everyone. I work with teachers. I have trained thousands of teachers. I never found that teachers as a community or as a category of employees were less motivated than those of any other system, private or public, provided you give them the right kind of environment. The right kind of environment does not mean only money. A good environment means respect, dignity, motivation to learn, opportunity to create, to do innovative things. Our whole system, before foreign funding and after foreign funding, has been a system where teachers do not have any space for their creativity or for their innovation because the curriculum and textbooks are so restrictive. Any teacher who wishes to create or innovate will be told by the headmaster or the principal that they had better prepare children for passing examinations. This is the story before 1993 when the District Primary Education Programme came in and is still the story today.

There’s another issue with teachers. There are lots of foreign-funded research reports which talk about teachers only being present for 25% of the time. These are very selective reports. They do not investigate the issue of why teachers are de-motivated or why they are not found to be present. There are several studies today available, if one cares to look, that show that for almost one hundred days in an academic year government teachers are pulled out of the school system to either count people below the poverty line, or to count children ready for pulse polio injections, or to count sheep or count goats. And routinely once a year for several months, when there are censuses, elections and by-elections for everything from village panchayats (administrative areas) to state legislative assemblies and to parliaments, forget about a teacher being in the school. Will you do this in Britain? Will Prime Minister Brown allow a public school teacher in Britain to be absent on non-educational duties? If this is not allowed in Britain or the US, why here?

The ruling class of this country, the elite of this country, the intelligentsia today are not sending their children to government schools. Therefore the poor majority are paying for the sake of Indian democracy, which takes place because of censuses, elections and voter lists, all maintained and reviewed by our schoolteachers at the cost of children’s education.

Do any high fee charging private schools in India allow teachers to be taken off duty by the government? The answer is clearly no.

The DFID says its work in India “is valued for its expertise and innovation across sectors,” (from the DFID India assistance brochure). I was speaking to a DFID official and he was saying the money it provides allows governments to be creative in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. It allows bureaucrats the freedom to innovate, to experiment in ways that can then be up-scaled.

Bureaucrats may have freedom to innovate but this has been lost by academics and educationalists. Why do bureaucrats need the freedom to innovate? Innovation in the education system should be by schoolteachers; it is schoolteachers who should be innovating. How can a bureaucrat understand education? He or she has never studied education as a discipline, has never been trained in this field. Today’s bureaucrats will innovate only in the framework of the global market.

We have de-motivated the entire teaching community of government schools by giving the false political message that to teach is not a duty. And the government can afford to do this because the children who suffer will be poor children and not the children of the elite or those of the high-profile, upwardly mobile Indian middle-class.

I would be the first to grant things did not function properly before foreign funding started. I was part of that process in which a large number of voluntary bodies intervened in the government school system in the early 1970s to help improve its quality. I was part of a group which intervened in more than three hundred schools in the Hoshengabad district of Madhya Pradesh in the 1970s to teach science through the scientific method, and to promote the scientific temper, by getting children to do experiments with their own hands. This was done in government schools in villages: thousands of children were doing experiments with their own hands in Classes 6-8 with virtually no facilities, and taught by teachers who sometimes did not have a science background. And they were teaching well, because they had freedom and had been trained to teach well.

We could create a totally different culture of learning and this was possible in government schools. That was the only programme in the country, before or after independence, before foreign funding or after foreign funding, when government schools taught science as science should be taught – through the method of science – while high charging, private schools in India were making children learn science through rote-learning.

So, we have evidence in this state of Madhya Pradesh that government schools can perform better.

Many of the DFID’s staff in India are Indian and it makes a big thing of working with local experts and civil society. Doesn’t that give its work more legitimacy?

But who is it working with? In the 1970s and 80s there was a large body of academics and scientists who felt it was a duty to intervene in school education and bring about improvements. They were doing it free of charge. Now this sense of duty has been transformed into consultancy. The same body of people have become consultants, or they have started an NGO, because by becoming an NGO you will get funding out of assessing Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan or another funded programme. This NGO term was not here in India until 1991. Until then we were known as voluntary bodies. If a group of people felt empowered to do something for society they would decide, register and organise a body then they would start working. Whatever they did was their own mission. Today, almost all NGOs are fund-driven and the sources of funds decide what you will do.

I have been in the field of education for the last 35 years and I’ve seen how this feeling of the right to intervene in education is not there in NGOs any more, or with academics or intellectuals. In Madhya Pradesh, a large body of NGOs, which in the year 2000 were doing work for women’s empowerment, because they were led by women, in 2001 suddenly got funding for poverty alleviation, under the Poorest Areas Civil Society programme, which is also funded by the DFID. After three or four years they were funded through the programme, then they suddenly become HIV AIDS agencies. They are now fighting AIDS.

The manufacturing of consent takes different shapes. One of the shapes it takes, is even before you start your groundwork in India, you take some senior most officials of the government and take them on a foreign trip, to Washington DC or to London or to some international conference, or to Brazil, or to Nigeria. You start funding research on a large scale. Foreign funded research is today a big thing in Indian social sciences and in education also. Assessing Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is a big business. Many NGOs have come up just to assess Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and many have come up to measure literacy. Many will come up to measure skills. And there’s one more sector opening up: the latest thing is to assess disabled children in order to decide whether they are fit to come into regular schooling or not. So assessment of disability is going to be the new market now and a lot of foreign funds will come in.

This is happening all over India. Intellectuals hold certain views not because they worked them out themselves but because they are being funded by the World Bank or by some other funding agency, and this is truly a disastrous phenomenon. You cannot relate to intellectuals as equals because they are being funded by someone. The whole discourse has fragmented between those larger bodies of people who are funded and those who are not. And this is very frightening.

I’ve seen this happening in front of my eyes. In Hoshengabad we worked free of cost. We never expected even a penny. We paid for our travel by train and bus out of our pockets. We felt we owed it to the country and the society. When foreign funding started in school education in the 1990s people were offered a daily honorarium, to begin with of Rs1,000 (£15) and within a few years it was upgraded to Rs3,000. By 2002-3, many of them were getting Rs5,000 a day, for just travelling to a place and being around for 2-3 hours with school teachers. The British public may not understand, it will be lost in the conversion rates, but for us, where minimum wages are still Rs 60-80 (£1.20) a day, getting Rs1,000 a day in addition to your salary is a large amount of money.

They do precisely what they are asked to do when they take this consultancy. And I have first hand reports from such friends who have been consultants that they knew that the reports they submitted as part of this were so damning to the foreign-funded programme that they would not be accepted and so doctoring the report becomes part of the process. The World Bank funded District Primary Education Programme had review missions. Half the people would be from western countries, half from India. They would go on these honorariums to villages but they would come back to the state capital, stay in five-star hotels and write a report that more often than not would be doctored by the organisers. And I asked my friends, who are honest people, who I have known a long time, why did you not object, why did you allow it to be doctored? And they said, “Easy money will not come again and if we keep objecting, our names will be written off the rolls of consultants.” It has happened to the best of our people. Lost to our whole civil society, to our whole intellectual world.

The British Government will have spent more than £2 billion in India by 2015, which is a lot of money, but I was surprised to read that all of the aid it gives only amounts to less than 0.06% of India’s Gross Domestic Product? Does India need this money?

I’ll read out some statistics for you to illustrate this point. I think it’s very important to clarify a misunderstanding about the quantum of financial assistance which India has been receiving from all the external funding agencies, not just the DFID.

As a percentage of the total central plan – the plan money for new projects, new development initiatives, to be funded by the central government – the total external assistance – that given by all foreign countries plus development agencies like the World Bank – will amount to only 1.3%. That means that when the government gives almost Rs99 it has collected from taxes, customs and so on, external assistance will add only one more. The question is can the government not also afford to provide one additional Rupee?

Why do we need this money? Why do we need to take a begging bowl? Why do we need a full department tasked with dealing with external assistance? Why do we need to sign Memoranda of Understanding full of conditions and which are kept secret, more secret than our defence documents? Even the Right to Information Act cannot get you the MoU between the Government of India and another government giving external assistance.

And in addition to these statistics I have statistics I have worked out to do with education. All externally aided projects in India, which include World Bank, EU, Canadian, Australian, as well as British aid, all this put together in 2001-2, which are the dates for which figures were made available to me, constituted 0.058% of GDP. Let me repeat this: 0.058%. Similarly, as a percentage of total expenditure on education from 2001-2, the external assistance constituted only 1.5%.

So the question which arises from all these figures I have been reading out to you, or which should arise in any thinking person’s mind, is: why is India asking for this money? What is India’s need for this pittance of assistance, and what is the need of the British government, or the British public, to extend this small pittance of assistance? And the only plausible answer is that this small pittance, this minuscule proportion of assistance we receive from foreign countries, gives each of these countries a handle on policy formulation in India. With this small handle they can then manipulate policies, not just in education for which they have given money, but also by sending their experts, their powerful lobbyists and negotiators along with the educationalists to lobby for other fields also, to open doors for the mining industry, sales of land or genetically modified foods, which are a big issue in India already. All these sectors that are now being opened up for global capital require lobbyists, expertise of various kinds, negotiators, and they’ll all come along as a ”bonus” with education assistance.

And this is only using education as a means of getting into the Indian economy and Indian policy-making. That is why this small minuscule proportion is given by them and precisely for the same reason it is taken by the Indian leadership and officials because they are also going along with the market economy and global capital investment in Indian resources.

But, never the less, isn’t it a good thing, given the problems in the education system, to give even a little assistance?

But you must consider the financial context in which it is being given. In 1991, when our government announced its new economic policy and decided to open the doors of its economy to the whole world, it asked for more loans and grants from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They placed their conditions. This was called a structural adjustment programme. One of the conditions under this programme was to reduce expenditure on the social sector; education and health and also social welfare. In return for this reduction the government was promised by the World Bank that it would open a programme of social assistance in which some money would be given as loans and grants in compensation for the reduction of resources in this field. And this is precisely what was done from 1991 onwards.

In 1986, when our new policy was approved by the parliament, one of the things that was approved was a commitment to increase expenditure in education at such a pace that it would rise to at least 6% of GDP by 1996. If you look at the graph showing expenditure as a percentage of GDP you will find that after the ‘86 policy, under new democratic pressure, it started rising rapidly (before foreign funding came in). From 1986 to 1990 it rose from about 3.5% to 4.01%. After 1991 it started falling and continued to fall. It went on falling until it again reached the level of 3.5%, the same level that was achieved in 1986.

And all that you hear today about increased funding for school education, one has to analyse it very carefully. It increased in the funding of the central government’s plan. This cannot be matched by state government plans and since the state government provides more than 80% of the funds for education, it means an increase in a fifth of the sector will not be felt in the other four-fifths of the sector.

All in all, we are at 3.5% again of GDP, whereas if we had followed the calculations of the 1986 policy we would have reached 6% in 1996. We rose slightly and again started falling. In the last 20 years there has been a cumulative gap of investment. People do not know or talk about this. Funding agencies probably know but they do not want to talk about it. A cumulative gap has been building up in twenty years that means there are [fewer] schools than we need, [fewer] classrooms, [fewer] laboratories and teaching aids, [fewer] new teachers, [fewer] teacher training institutions, less of everything we need for the improvement of quality. The cumulative gap translated into resources and infrastructure has been growing.

So, today even if we somehow rise from 3.5% of GDP to 6%, which is highly unlikely, that is not going to be enough. We have to first fill up the cumulative gap and provide all the things which should have been provided in the last 20 years, and then make it 6% of GDP – and that’s a basic maintenance level. And, we are nowhere even planning to do that.

So, whether it’s the DFID, Canadian aid, US aid, Swiss aid, Australian aid, a UN agency or the World Bank, they all have a common framework which has emerged out of the Jomtien Declaration of 1990 and now the Millennium Development Goals. The DFID doesn’t have any other policy but to fall within this framework. It is not asking the right questions.

You can try and pose these questions but they will immediately evade them. They have decided that free education of equitable quality is not their goal. It was the goal of Dr Ambedkar in our constitution, but it is not the goal that the DFID will support. And they have partners in the government – in the planning commission, in the central government, in the civil service and the political leadership.

And today, no political party is interested in these issues. The idea of the fundamental right to education is neither important to the leadership of our various political parties, nor is it important to funding agencies like the DFID.

See, education is about the mind. It’s about values. It’s about our attitudes to society and to fellow beings. This is probably the most critical sector because by changing our minds and our value system and our attitudes, we change our vision of future India. Would you allow such a critical area of your country to be affected by another country? You wouldn’t. You’ll hold onto British values and the British vision of education strongly. Of course you should! And if anything else is happening in other countries you’ll learn, but that will be your choice, to learn from other countries.

Please allow us to build our own vision of education and don’t try to manipulate our minds and our values and our attitudes as per your market paradigm or any other paradigm. We’ll do our own homework properly. If we can fight our battle to save the Narmada valley from big dams, if we can fight battles to save our cultivable, fertile lands from special economic zones, we can also fight our battles to save our schools from both Indian private capital and foreign private capital and base them on the Indian constitution. We can do this. We were already in the process when this minuscule of foreign funding entered India.

But the DFID makes much of its partnership with the Government of India and is keen to stress everything it does is in tandem with it. It claims that its legitimacy to work in India comes from the fact that it works with the government and is therefore part of the democratic system.

And if the government is not extending the universal right to education, and education of equitable quality, to all children, still the DFID will support the government? If that is the way that the DFID is going to work out its role, we don’t need the DFID. In any case their contribution is such a miniscule contribution. Even if they pull out entirely it will make no difference to us. We have enough money in this country, to do the wrong thing or the right things. Either way we’ve got enough money. If the entire external assistance pulls out, it will mean maybe 0.2% of the entire funding being reduced. What difference does it make? It makes no difference to us.

But it makes a difference to the funding agencies. By having this access to these various programmes, they can sit in the decision making fora. They can make sure that merely literacy and skills development remains the objective of India’s education system. If any political leader or any education planner wishes to shift from these goals, they’ll face a foreign representative telling them not to do this.

And they have very intelligent arguments. I have faced these people. They say let’s at least get the literacy first, we’ll get the rest later. Let’s at least get five years of primary education, we’ll get the rest later. For the last fifteen years I have been hearing agencies telling us this!

So, one expects [that] an agency like the DFID, as it comes from Britain, has benefited from the great liberal tradition of Britain, from which we have also learnt. If it has emerged from the British liberal tradition, why is it supporting an inferior quality education programme? Why is it supporting a multi-layered school education programme? Why is it not telling our government, go back to your constitution and follow it?

Because the DFID is part of the global market system. Its objective is not education. Its objective is to develop the global market. And for the global market you require private capital in school education and private control of school education. The DFID is there to ensure that all this happens.

I think the public in Britain, the ordinary people of Britain, should ask their government, “Why are you funding such a low quality programme in India out of the public exchequer?” And to an extent which is such a miniscule proportion of the total spending, ridiculously miniscule, that even if the DFID is not there, India has got enough resources to continue. I’ve always argued, getting some small succour from an alien source like this weakens the political resolve of the country.

I’ll make an appeal to the British public, by asking a question: would you allow this to be done in your country by the Indian Government? If your answer is no then please use all your resources and all your liberal political traditions to build public pressure on your government to stop DFID, and through the British Government to persuade the US Government, to get out of India from the education sector. Leave us to fight our own battles.

We know how to run Indian democracy. We also have people who have studied education as a serious discipline. We have also learned from Ivan Ilych and from several liberal innovative schools of Britain, and we keep reading those books for our inspiration. We have also learned from Gandhi, from Rabindranath Tagore. We know what good education means. We know that.

Please let us fight our own battles in our own country in our own way. That is my appeal to the British public.
* Senior Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi (2001-06); Member, National Commission on Teachers (1983-84); Member, National Policy on Education-1986 Review Committee (1990); Member, Central Advisory Board of Education (2004-06); Member, National Steering Committee of National Curriculum Framework-2005 (2004-05); Chairperson, National Focus Group on ‘Work and Education’, NCERT (2004-05); Member, Common School System Commission, Bihar (2006-07)

** As of 2008

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