India's GM Decision Shows Neglect of People's Movements

Ranjit Devraj / Inter Press Service - Asia Times 28mar02

NEW DELHI - When India's right-wing government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, granted approval for the commercial farming of genetically modified (GM) cotton Tuesday, it was yet another sign of its readiness to ignore civil society at home and please transnational corporations and the West, critics say.

The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) under the Ministry of Environment cleared cultivation of GM cotton, patented by the U.S. seed giant Monsanto, in spite of demands by top international campaigners for better and more scientific testing.

Vandana Shiva, who heads the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Environment, said the test conducted so far were ''not adequate to establish the benefits nor fully assess the risks''.

Genetically modified crops have been banned in several countries because the technology involves splicing genes from different species for desirable characteristics with as yet unknown long-term consequences to the environment and to human health.

Said Devinder Sharma of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, ''The GEAC approval can only be described as the biggest ever scientific fraud in this country. . . .all scientific norms have been thrown to the winds''.

Suman Sahai, who leads Gene Campaign, pointed out that Monsanto's GM cotton was approved on the basis of valid field testing data for just one year and even that is yet to be made available to the public for scrutiny. But the cavalier manner with which approval for GM cotton came through was one of several decisions that critics say have gone against the rights and interests of ordinary people.

In October 2000, the Supreme Court of India ignored years of struggle by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) or Save the Narmada Movement against the displacement of 300,000 people to allow further heightening of the five billion U.S. dollar Sardar Sarovar Dam across the Narmada River in western India.

According NBA leader Medha Patkar, the court preferred to side with the interests of urban elites that see in the project water for hydropower, irrigation and municipal and industrial water supply, while ignoring the plight of displaced tribals and peasants.

Ignored also were claims made by the NBA that the area around the Narmada valley had a history of hydrological and seismic problems and that cheaper and more sustainable ways of generating electricity and gaining access to water needed to be explored.

The Booker prize-winning author, Arundhati Roy, who criticized the court's judgment and championed the cause of the displaced in an essay called 'The Greater Common Good' was hauled up by the court and sent to jail for one day earlier this month on contempt-of-court charges.

A newly released report 'Power Finance: Financial Institutions in India's Hydropower Sector' , by researcher Peter Bosshard, tells the story of how uneconomic and destructive projects are funded in India while keeping the public and those directly affected in the dark.

The report, published by the International Rivers Network, the German rights group Urgewald and the South Asia Network on Dams Rivers and People (SANDRP), also tells the murky story of the U.S. energy giant Enron's stalled 2,000-megawatt project at Dabhol in western Maharashtra state. Dabhol once stood for the promises of economic liberalization and private foreign investment but ended up symbolizing the opportunities that privatization offers for corruption and private enrichment, notes Bosshard.

Right from the start the project was opposed by affected communities, by the Indian power sector experts and by a growing popular movement, mainly because of lack of transparency.

Enron resorted to violence against protestors and directly paid the police to suppress popular resistance. Amnesty International in 1997 found evidence of harassment, arbitrary arrest, preventive detention and ill-treatment by the company, Bosshard said in his report.

The government, last year, sold off majority shares in the profitable public sector Bharat Aluminium Company (BALCO) to a private firm although constitutional provisions prohibit the alienation from government control of assets standing on tribal land -- in this case a plant in the tribal state of central Chattisgarh.

In February, environmental groups were caught by surprise by a statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs welcoming U.S. President George W Bush's Valentine's Day policy statement rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, under which the United States would have had to reduce greenhouse gases by seven percent from 1990 levels.

The statement came in spite of the fact that India is among nations that are likely to be worst hit by climate change, unless countries like the U.S. reign in their greenhouse gas emissions.

It also negated the Indian Ministry of Environment's long-standing stance at climate change negotiations that industrialized countries should be the first to cut greenhouse gas emissions, since they account for the bulk of emissions that cause global warming.

Bush had said that ''developing countries such as China and India already account for a majority of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and it would be irresponsible to absolve them from shouldering some of the shared obligations''.

According to Sunita Narain, chief of the prestigious Centre for Science and Environment, the government apparently ''buckled under pressure to support the isolated U.S. government on a plan that everybody else was junking''.

source: http://atimes.com/ind-pak/DC28Df01.html