Take a Ride on the Indian Railway

I’ve spent a lot of my time in India hurtling across the country in a railway car. Most times, I’m lucky enough to get booked on a third AC car (~Rs. 300 for a 4 hour journey), which is equivalent to traveling business class on a flight. AC class cars not only have the eponymous AC comfort, but also provide bedsheets and pillows for your bunk*. AC cars are also better kept and cleaner than the general cars; they are also strictly monitored by the ticket inspectors to prevent stowaways. Other times, if the booking is made too late, then it’s by regular sleeper cars I go (~Rs. 200). These open air cars offer the bare bunk bed covered in noticeably dirty vinyl and you risk having cockroaches and mice skitter across your bunk while you are comatose. Still, sleeper cars are guaranteed seating and loitering in these cars by non-ticket holders is kept to a minimum. Sometimes, fortune deals me an unlucky hand and I’m stuck in the general seating car (~Rs. 100), which is a free-for-all arrangement where you can place yourself wherever you find space. I once traveled during the night from Jamshedpur to Kolkata, and there were literally people sleeping under my seat, in the aisles, and even on the luggage racks.

I think it’s the latter scenario that really amazes me about the Indian rail system. A number of people have documented the incredible heartline of India that is the railway – The New York Times featured a video last month and of course, there’s Paul Theroux’s definitive travelogues (The Great Railway Bazaar) of 20 years back. But in my opinion, what is remarkable is how the railway system is an equalizer in a country that is normally full of disparities. The highly subsidized tickets ensure that just about anyone can afford a train journey. Even daily wage earners can save up for the Rs. 100 ticket for occasional trips back to their native villages. It also means that various holy and culturally significant destinations around the country are accessible to everyone. As long as you can save a few rupees per month, you can make a pilgrimage to one of the holy temple cities. I remember standing in the gardens of the Taj Mahal and seeing all sorts of citizens enjoying their country’s wonder. Talking to my auto driver later, I was told that a lot of poor Indians come from around the country to see the Taj Mahal. Like some of the more popular temples, the Taj is on the to-do list of many poor people as the culmination of a lifelong pilgrimage. There’s no such equalizer in any other country that I’ve been through, where even bus journeys can be prohibitively expensive for the poor. [The only exception perhaps is the Chinatown bus system between New York, Boston, DC, and North Carolina]

Of course, there is also a more unpleasant side to the great railway system. As the New York Times video and others have noted, the railways are overtaxed and under maintained. While the general seating cars offer the poor an affordable transportation option, the conditions are also appalling. The overfilled general compartments are unsafe for female passengers during the night, not to mention the unsanitary conditions of such overcrowding. Let’s all pray that no one with a highly contagious disease gets onto a general seating car, because the spread of that epidemic would be unstoppable.

There are other aspects of the railway system that are hard to stomach. Waiting at the Surat station in Gujurat, I saw workers digging and removing the sewage waste on the tracks by hand! They had no gloves, no tools, nothing but a metal pan onto which they piled the waste to carry to another spot for dumping. Demeaning nature of the work aside, the blatant health hazards of the job alarm me enough. While manual waste scavengers aren’t seen at every station, their existence is a complaint that I’d like to lodge with the railway authorities.

But perhaps that’s the problem – the massive network of crisscrossing tracks lacks a central authority. Each region has its own jurisdiction over the railways and as much else in Indian, the level of functionality entirely depends on the region in question. As expected, the Southeastern Railway that governs the routes I travel on most, between West Bengal and Jharkhand, is one of the weaker authorities. Our trains and stations are noticeably more dilapidated and dirtier than the other lines that I’ve taken in other parts of the country.

It’s really a shame that such a great asset of the country is slowly deteriorating without enough care. A central power really needs to take up the task of renovating and better upkeep of the system. And until someone forces the Southeastern Railway to shape up, the only thing I can say to redeem the Howrah station in Kolkata is that at least it has the largest array of food vendors out of any train station I’ve seen.

* Most train journeys are overnight, and thus these are sleeping cars. There are also AC chair cars.

August 4, 2010 | Tags: , | View Comments

Climate Change: Things Are Heating Up Around Here

The hot story of the month around Jamshedpur has been the increasing temperatures felt around the city and the growing concerns around a drought. Newspapers report that by late May, temperatures will be as high as 50C and staying there as the summer peaks around June 21, the solstice. Every morning, the lady who comes to clean the apartment says to me as a way of greeting, “Bahut garmi hai, na? Zyada garmi lagte hai”, indicating that it’s very hot. In fact, it’s much hotter and drier than it used to be.

The fact is that these changes in weather patterns aren’t just peculiar of this year; it’s been a gradual change that has worsened annually, directly caused by global warming. Local Jamshedpur residents remember a time when the unrelenting summer rays were interrupted by daily afternoon showers, which would cool the city. But those days are distant memories of twenty years back.  These days, we have to wait for the monsoons for any hope of relief.

In April, The Times of India (Jharkhand edition) reported that “Extreme heat drying up water bodies and triggering flash fires in Jharkhand forests are not just usual implications of summer scorch, rather it has links with climate changes.” The ripple effect of this extreme heat on the environment is great. The traditional Sakhua tree, an important source of timber for Jharkhand state, is no longer flowering because of the lack of conventional rainfall. Droughts also decrease crop yields and result in seed shortages, which contribute the overall poverty of the state. The Gene Campaign even goes as far as to state the Naxal rebellions in Jharkhand are an outcome of poverty caused by poor drought management by the government.

However, Jamshedpur isn’t the only place facing these noticeable changes in climate. Intelligent Life Magazine recently ran a poignant article on the disappearing seasons around the world: in Orissa, an eastern Indian state, farmers have noticed that the monsoon rains no longer follow the predictable schedule of centuries old. The monsoons come earlier than usual, causing floods and destroying crops. In Uganda, farmers have noticed that their once reliable two rainy seasons of three months have been replaced by spotty rains of one month duration. In Kashmir, the brief rainy season between winter and spring, called “tsonth” has completely vanished in the last decade. The examples of missing rainy seasons are numerous and the impact is felt on many levels from the ecological cycle to the millions of farmers whose crops are devastated.

While I sat in my hot, dusty flat lamenting my bad luck for arriving in Jamshedpur during a particularly hot year, I was completely unaware that in actuality, it’s just the world’s back luck that our planet is heating up.  The heat in Jamshedpur is certainly unpleasant, but the environmental consequences of global warming are even more unpleasant – for everyone. So the next time you escape from an unusually hot summer’s day into an air conditioned bubble, pause for a moment and think about why it’s so darn hot. And see if you still doubt global warming.

May 15, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | View Comments

Jamshedpur: A Tale of Two Cities

I recently relocated to Jamshedpur, also known as Tatanagar (i.e., Tata Colony). Like other industrial cities that developed around one manufacturer, everything in Jamshedpur revolves around Tata Steel. In the most literal sense, Tata’s main steel plant and blast furnaces sit atop the only hill, overlooking the entire city. Nearby, there is a Tata hospital, Tata school, Tata research archives and museum, and even Tata security – the only public structure missing is a Tata Temple. However, unlike Nike in Niketown or Benz in Stuttgart which are deified in public, Tata is even ubiquitous in the home, thanks to its horizontal diversifications into the manufacturing of every commercial good. We cook with Tata salt, drink Tata tea, watch TataSky tv, which is powered by Tata electricity. [Most recently, Tata has started bottling water as well, so it’s only a matter of time before that catches on]

But much as I mock the invasion of Tata branded everything in my life, it is also a blessing to live under Tata’s competent operations. There are parts of Jamshedpur which are maintained by the public government of Jharkhand, and the differences in quality of life between the privately and publicly managed areas are stark.

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During these hot summer months when electricity is in high demand, load shedding is a part of life.  My building’s electricity is supplied by Tata’s power plant, but the building across the street is not and is instead wired to the public grid. The dependability of Tata power versus public power is as different as fire and ice. Tata power suffers infrequent outages the longest, of which I’ve experienced, lasted ~15 minutes.  In comparison, it’s not uncommon to watch the lights across the street suddenly spark out every other night. As the heat reaches 50C in the peak of summer, these outages are also becoming more frequent across the street and last for longer periods. The luckier families across the street have small back-up generators, but for the large majority of those who live in humble houses, they sit in darkness without light and worst of all, without a fan to relieve them from the heat. Last week, the publicly supplied power was out for 3 days straight.

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Jamshedpur proper has a reputation of being the “Green City” and “Clean City”, titles which it lives up to. Most areas of the city are exceptionally clean and litter-free, remarkable for a metropolitan in India. Jubilee Park, a popular gathering place for families during the evenings, is spotlessly kept with neat rows of trees and well tended green lawns. The streets of the city even have sidewalks, which pedestrians use! Tata has taken a great effort as a private corporation to maintain the city, and it shows. The contrast is on the other side of the tracks (literally), in Jugsalai – a periphery of the city, which is maintained by the public government.  Immediately upon crossing the railroad tracks, the narrow streets are covered with trash and order is left behind. The rubble piles, common to most cities in India, narrow the already crowded streets. In order to drive through Jugsalai, one has to inevitably drive over piles of building materials – gravel, sand, etc. – and avoid running over people and cattle who walk in the middle of these streets because the sidewalks have disappeared.

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It’s hard not to favor private management over public management when I witness such disparities within one city. As a stranger to this city, it’s hard for me comprehend how these two sides of Jamshedpur co-exist and how the public government can evade taking actions to improve the situation. How has there been no demand by the population to close the gaps between these two realities? I would demand a more dependable supply of power that won’t leave people sitting in the dark looking across the way into the brightly lit living rooms of their neighbors. The public government should start with that at least, otherwise Jamshedpur will always continue to be two cities – public and private – and we know which one wins that competition.

April 27, 2010 | Tags: , , , | View Comments

The Poor Don’t Have a Call Option Out of Poverty

Frequent field visits to rural villages also mean many long and uncomfortable bus or train rides. During a recent visit to villages around Tanjore in Tamil Nadu, the Villgro fellows logged over 11 hours on public buses in one day. A number of factors contribute to an extremely uncomfortable trip: 80% humidity in 40C weather, many human bodies squeezed into a limited space, general dusty and traffic polluted air, and ultimately too many hours sweating into the same clothes.

At first, I rationalized to myself that the discomfort was only bothering me and in my head because my North American accustomed self was not acclimated yet. But the reality is that time doesn’t bring immunity to the heat, because the other fellows (including a Tamilian) were just as sweaty and uncomfortable as me we began to stick to each other – real fellow bonding. So instead, I sought comfort in the thought of eventually reaching our guest house in Tanjore, where a shower and an A/C room would grant me relief. That was my light at the end of the tunnel.

It occurred to me then: that light at the end of the tunnel is a privilege that 60% of India doesn’t have. It isn’t a real struggle for me to sit through a day of sticky bus rides nor, if extrapolated further, is it really courageous of me to quit my management consulting job for the social sector in India, because at the end of the day (or year), there’s always an emergency eject button. If I were really miserable in my fellowship project and wanted to return to the comfort and luxuries of the developed world, I can opt out of India. In fact for many of us working in the social development sector, this job is a choice that we have made and a choice that we can undo.

Next to my apartment is a construction site, and through the window is the sight of women in colorful saris balancing pans of sand or concrete on their heads transferring building materials to the masons. They work through the day, in the hot, stifling 45C heat of Jamshedpur, hotter than Death Valley in the States. I can safely say that no one gets accustomed to working in this kind of heat, but what choice do they have?

The rural poor don’t have a call option out of these harsh conditions. They don’t have the savings, the education, or the opportunities to opt out of their discomfort and misery. They must continue to toil without the comfort of seeing an end in sight.  The unforgiving harsh conditions of India’s climate and poverty are their everyday reality, but that’s why social entrepreneurship is important. We are working to give them a call option to get out.

The discomforts that sometimes come about while working in the developing rural sector serves as a good reminder of the important potential of the impact achieved by the work that we do. If social enterprises can achieve providing the poor with that light at the end of the tunnel, it will be worth all the sticky bus rides we have to sit through.

April 12, 2010 | Tags: | View Comments

Right to Access Healthcare

Access to healthcare has become the topic du jour thanks to the monumental legislation in progress in the United States. On this side of the world also, healthcare accessibility is also a pressing problem, but on a level that Americans would have a hard time fathoming. Most of the rural population in India are more than 3km from the nearest Public Health Center (PHC) which makes it extremely difficult for them to access health care. Even more concerning is that basic maternal healthcare is still unavailable in many rural villages. The UNDP estimated that 60% of births in India are still unattended by a medical professional.

A number of social enterprises have risen to the challenge and have low-cost models for providing the essential basic healthcare that each person deserves. The Villgro fellows visited with a few during the past month of training (both models are public private partnerships):

  • Byrraju Foundation runs a healthcare clinic in each of its adopted villages, where patients can seek diagnosis and treatment for common conditions – e.g., hypertension, diabetes, etc. These patients pay a nominal fee of Rs. 20, which allows them to get a routine check-up from a nurse and a consultation with a retired doctor.
  • Health Management and Research Institute (HMRI) runs a mobile clinic program, where once a month, a healthcare van with medical supplies, 2 qualified nurses and pharmacist operate a temporary clinic in the village.

    HMRI Mobile Clinic Van

    Patients are provided check-ups, medication, and if necessary, consultation referrals to the nearest PHC. The emphasis is to encourage villagers who normally wouldn’t seek treatment for ailments at the PHC due to the distance to come forth and get treated. Particular emphasis is placed on maternal health, where the local ASHAs are charged with the task to get pregnant women to come to the clinics for monthly check-ups.

Both of these models are providing great services to the rural villages, but it’s still not enough. While visiting HMRI, the district manager told us that these clinics faced a difficulty in getting pregnant mothers to come for check-ups – their husbands often prevented them from going to the clinics. This deeply disturbs me. By denying their wives access to pregnancy check-ups, these husbands are risking the lives of both the mother and child. There are a few reasons, both rational and irrational, for why this is so:

  1. 1. Opportunity Cost of Time – going to the clinic, even in the village will take half a day of the mother’s time, which is also equivalent to half a day of wages. Pregnancy check-up is not valued highly enough to justify the lost wages
  2. 2. Distrust of Nurses – distrust of examinations that may compromise her modesty is a perceived barrier that is reinforced by cultural tendencies to shelter women from the public arena
  3. 3. Undervaluing Women – although less frequently an explicit reason, there is still a systemic undervaluing of a woman’s life that leads a husband to bar his wife from receiving free clinical check-ups. There still persists the idea that a man can remarry easily, or to put it bluntly – she is replaceable

HMRI has counseling and intervention systems in place to deal with the first two reasons. The ASHAs as well as HMRI personnel who are trained will prevail upon the husband to help him understand the value of regular check-ups during pregnancy. Often, it’s merely a lack of awareness and education and the problem can be corrected.

However, the third reason is more insidious and is a cultural problem that many developing countries face. Women still need to be empowered all around the world to be able to exercise their right to seek healthcare, particularly maternal healthcare. The WHO estimated recently that for every 100,000 births, there are 540 maternal mortalities. That is an astoundingly high number, which organizations like HMRI are trying to improve. But unless women can actually access the care made available by HMRI, the high maternal mortality rate will persist. For all the women that HMRI is able help, there are many more who are unknown to HMRI who are prevented from receiving care.  For those women, it’s not the access to healthcare that we need to worry about, but rather the right to access the existing healthcare that we need to fix.

April 8, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | View Comments

Semantics: Objectifying People in Hindi

I’m fascinated by learning languages, not only because they allow you communicate with people, but also because of how much cultural value is embedded within. Native speakers of languages often miss the implicit meanings within the sentences they say; but for the language student laboring over every grammatical construction, these cultural gems can make it all worth the effort.

One such curiosity of the Hindi language is in showing possession. In English, we use the verb “to have” for everything. In Hindi, the construction is different depending on the situation:

1. “Ko” indicating a state of being as in “I have a cold”

2. “Ke paas” is used for possession of portable, tangible objects (and time)

3. “Ka/Ki/Ke” are used to indicate relationships with people and ownership of large immovable structures (e.g., I own a house or I have a brother)

What is curious though is that “ke paas”, which is used for portable objects, also encompasses servants! For example, if I wanted to say that she has a driver, I would say, “Vah ke paas driver hai”. This would be the same construction applied to all portable possessions, from books to furniture. The implication of this particular grammar rule is that servants are considered portable possessions.

Of course, this rule is dated and certainly not necessarily an accurate reflection of how servants are treated today in India. However, it still shocks many of the Hindi speakers with whom I’ve discussed this point. They never realized that they were making an implicit value statement when they spoke. The fact is that servants are still very much a part of Indian society – my roommate and I have a live-in housekeeper who takes care of us. And while many maids and housekeepers are treated very well and are seen as part of the family, a class division still exists within the society which is greatly explained by the cultural values hidden within Hindi. Perhaps awareness of this issue is the first step towards bridging the spoken divide. Or perhaps it’s all just semantics.

March 8, 2010 | Tags: , , | View Comments

Going to the Source

Returning to India, I’m struck once again by the dramatic differences between the sights, sounds, and smells (emphasis on the smells) of Chennai and those of New York or San Francisco. The perpetual honking of auto-rickshaws and smell of spices mixed with human bodies serves as a daily reminder that this is not San Francisco and I should not treat Chennai as if it is. This is an obvious statement when observing culture, so why isn’t the same logic applied to social impact?

Why do we still operate and fund social enterprises, which are trying to achieve impact in developing countries, from the comforts of a developed world city 20,000km away?

The question is not new, but the problem persists. Many social enterprises that are aimed at improving conditions in developing countries are still operated out of cities such as New York and San Francisco, which are far removed from the center of action. Ever since social entrepreneurship became the “it” industry for generation Y, more and more young professionals have expressed an interest and have engaged in social start-ups situated in the developing world.  While I am encouraged that more people are getting involved, I doubt the effectiveness  of the enthusiasts who have not spent a significant amount of time in the place they’re trying to help. I do not think a week-long field visit qualifies as significant.  This leads to an issue: what is often perceived as valuable by the social entrepreneur is not similarly perceived by the rural consumers. The simple fact is that it is not possible to understand the nuances of the context and in particular what the target consumer needs without investing a lot of time to experience it.

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February 24, 2010 | Tags: , , | View Comments