As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we find ourselves at one of those relatively rare moments in history when major power shifts become visible to all. If the first decade of the century witnessed profound changes, the world of 2009 nonetheless looked at least somewhat like the world of 1999 in certain fundamental respects: the United States remained the world’s paramount military power, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency, and NATO remained its foremost military alliance, to name just three.

By the end of the second decade of this century, however, our world is likely to have a genuinely different look to it. Momentous shifts in global power relations and a changing of the imperial guard, just now becoming apparent, will be far more pronounced by 2020 as new actors, new trends, new concerns, and new institutions dominate the global space. Nonetheless, all of this is the norm of history, no matter how dramatic it may seem to us.

Less normal — and so the wild card of the second decade (and beyond) — is intervention by the planet itself. Blowback, which we think of as a political phenomenon, will by 2020 have gained a natural component. Nature is poised to strike back in unpredictable ways whose effects could be unnerving and possibly devastating.

What, then, will be the dominant characteristics of the second decade of the twenty-first century? Prediction of this sort is, of course, inherently risky, but extrapolating from current trends, four key aspects of second-decade life can be discerned: the rise of China; the (relative) decline of the United States; the expanding role of the global South; and finally, possibly most dramatically, the increasing impact of a roiling environment and growing resource scarcity.

Let’s start with human history and then make our way into the unknown future history of the planet itself.

The Ascendant Dragon

That China has become a leading world power is no longer a matter of dispute. That country’s new-found strength was on full display at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December where it became clear that no meaningful progress was possible on the issue of global warming without Beijing’s assent. Its growing prominence was also evident in the way it responded to the Great Recession, as it poured multi-billions of dollars into domestic recovery projects, thereby averting a significant slowdown in its economy. It spent many tens of billions more on raw materials and fresh investments in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, helping to ignite recovery in those regions, too.

If China is an economic giant today, it will be a powerhouse in 2020. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), that country’s gross domestic product (GDP) will jump from an estimated $3.3 trillion in 2010 to $7.1 trillion in 2020 (in constant 2005 dollars), at which time its economy will exceed all others save that of the United States. In fact, its GDP then should exceed those of all the nations in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East combined. As the decade proceeds, China is expected to move steadily up the ladder of technological enhancement, producing ever more sophisticated products, including advanced green energy and transportation systems that will prove essential to future post-carbon economies. These gains, in turn, will give it increasing clout in international affairs.

China will undoubtedly also use its growing wealth and technological prowess to enhance its military power. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China is already the world’s second largest military spender, although the $85 billion it invested in its armed forces in 2008 was a pale shadow of the $607 billion allocated by the United States. In addition, its forces remain technologically unsophisticated and its weapons are no match for the most modern U.S., Japanese, and European equipment. However, this gap will narrow significantly in the century’s second decade as China devotes more resources to military modernization.

The critical question is: How will China use its added power to achieve its objectives?

Until now, China’s leaders have wielded its growing strength cautiously, avoiding behavior that would arouse fear or suspicion on the part of neighbors and economic partners. It has instead employed the power of the purse and “soft power” — vigorous diplomacy, development aid, and cultural ties — to cultivate friends and allies. But will China continue to follow this “harmonious,” non-threatening approach as the risks of forcefully pursuing its national interests diminish? This appears unlikely.

A more assertive China that showed what the Washington Post called “swagger” was already evident in the final months of 2009 at the summit meetings between presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao in Beijing and Copenhagen. In neither case did the Chinese side seek a “harmonious” outcome: In Beijing, it restricted Obama’s access to the media and refused to give any ground on Tibet or tougher sanctions on key energy-trading partner Iran; at a crucial moment in Copenhagen, it actually sent low-ranking officials to negotiate with Obama — an unmistakable slight — and forced a compromise that absolved China of binding restraints on carbon emissions.

If these summits are any indication, Chinese leaders are prepared to play global hard-ball, insisting on compliance with their core demands and giving up little even on matters of secondary importance. China will find itself ever more capable of acting this way because the economic fortunes of so many countries are now tied to its consumption and investment patterns — a pivotal global role once played by the United States — and because its size and location gives it a commanding position in the planet’s most dynamic region. In addition, in the first decade of the twenty-first century Chinese leaders proved especially adept at nurturing ties with the leaders of large and small countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that will play an ever more important role in energy and other world affairs.

To what ends will China wield its growing power? For the top leadership in Beijing, three goals will undoubtedly be paramount: to ensure the continued political monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to sustain the fast-paced economic growth which justifies its dominance, and to restore the country’s historic greatness. All three are, in fact, related: The CCP will remain in power, senior leaders believe, only so long as it orchestrates continuing economic expansion and satisfies the nationalist aspirations of the public as well as the high command of the People’s Liberation Army. Everything Beijing does, domestically and internationally, is geared to these objectives. As the country grows stronger, it will use its enhanced powers to shape the global environment to its advantage just as the United States has done for so long. In China’s case, this will mean a world wide-open to imports of Chinese goods and to investments that allow Chinese firms to devour global resources, while placing ever less reliance on the U.S. dollar as the medium of international exchange.

The question that remains unanswered: Will China begin flexing its growing military muscle? Certainly, Beijing will do so in at least an indirect manner. By supplying arms and military advisers to its growing network of allies abroad, it will establish a military presence in ever more areas. My suspicion is that China will continue to avoid the use of force in any situation that might lead to a confrontation with major Western powers, but may not hesitate to bring its military to bear in any clash of national wills involving neighboring countries. Such a situation could arise, for example, in a maritime dispute over control of the energy-rich South China Sea or in Central Asia, if one of the former Soviet republics became a haven for Uighur militants seeking to undermine Chinese control over Xinjiang Province.

The Eagle Comes in for a Landing

Just as the rise of China is now taken for granted, so, too, is the decline of the United States. Much has been written about America’s inevitable loss of primacy as this country suffers the consequences of economic mismanagement and imperial overstretch. This perspective was present in Global Trends 2025, a strategic assessment of the coming decades prepared for the incoming Obama administration by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency. “Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025],” the NIC predicted, “the United States’ relative strength — even in the military realm — will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.”

Some unforeseen catastrophe aside, however, the U.S. is not likely to be poorer in 2020 or more backward technologically. In fact, according to the most recent Department of Energy projections, America’s GDP in 2020 will be approximately $17.5 trillion (in 2005 dollars), nearly one-third greater than today. Moreover, some of the initiatives already launched by President Obama to stimulate the development of advanced energy systems are likely to begin bearing fruit, possibly giving the United States an edge in certain green technologies. And don’t forget, the U.S. will remain the globe’s preeminent military power, with China lagging well behind, and no other potential rival able to mobilize even Chinese-level resources to challenge U.S. military advantages.

What will change is America’s position relative to China and other nations — and so, of course, its ability to dominate the global economy and the world political agenda. Again using DoE projections, we find that in 2005, America’s GDP of $12.4 trillion exceeded that of all the nations of Asia and South America combined, including Brazil, China, India, and Japan. By 2020, the combined GDP of Asia and South America will be about 40% greater than that of the U.S., and growing at a much faster rate. By then, the United States will be deeply indebted to more solvent foreign nations, especially China, for the funds needed to pay for continuing budget deficits occasioned by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget, the federal stimulus package, and the absorption of “toxic assets” from troubled banks and corporations.

Count on this, though: in an increasingly competitive world economy in which U.S. firms enjoy ever diminishing advantages, the prospects for ordinary Americans will be distinctly dimmer. Some sectors of the economy, and some parts of the country, will certainly continue to thrive, but others will surely suffer Detroit’s fate, becoming economically hollowed out and experiencing wholesale impoverishment. For many — perhaps most — Americans, the world of 2020 may still provide a standard of living far superior to that enjoyed by a majority of the world; but the perks and advantages that most middle class folks once took for granted — college education, relatively accessible (and affordable) medical care, meals out, foreign travel — will prove significantly harder to come by.

Even America’s military advantage will be much eroded. The colossal costs of the disastrous Iraq and Afghan wars will set limits on the nation’s ability to undertake significant military missions abroad. Keep in mind that, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a significant proportion of the basic combat equipment of the Army and Marine Corps has been damaged or destroyed in these wars, while the fighting units themselves have been badly battered by multiple tours of duty. Repairing this damage would require at least a decade of relative quiescence, which is nowhere in sight.

The growing constraints on American power were recently acknowledged by President Obama in an unusual setting: his West Point address announcing a troop surge in Afghanistan. Far from constituting a triumphalist expression of American power and preeminence, like President Bush’s speeches on the Iraq War, his was an implicit admission of decline. Alluding to the hubris of his predecessor, Obama noted, “We’ve failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of the economic crisis, too many of our neighbors and friends are out of work and struggle to pay the bills…. Meanwhile, competition in the global economy has grown more fierce. So we simply can’t afford to ignore the price of these wars.”

Many have chosen to interpret Obama’s Afghan surge decision as a typical twentieth-century-style expression of America’s readiness to intervene anywhere on the planet at a moment’s notice. I view it as a transitional move meant to prevent the utter collapse of an ill-conceived military venture at a time when the United States is increasingly being forced to rely on non-military means of persuasion and the cooperation, however tempered, of allies. President Obama said as much: “We’ll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power…. And we can’t count on military might alone.” Increasingly, this will be the mantra of strategic planning that will govern the American eagle in decline.

The Rising South

The second decade of the century will also witness the growing importance of the global South: the formerly-colonized, still-developing areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Once playing a relatively marginal role in world affairs, they were considered open territory, there to be invaded, plundered, and dominated by the major powers of Europe, North America, and (for a time) Japan. To some degree, the global South, a.k.a. the “Third World,” still plays a marginal role, but that is changing.

Once a member in good standing of the global South, China is now an economic superpower and India is well on its way to earning this status. Second-tier states of the South, including Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey, are on the rise economically, and even the smallest and least well-off nations of the South have begun to attract international attention as providers of crucial raw materials or as sites of intractable problems including endemic terrorism and crime syndicates.

To some degree, this is a product of numbers — growing populations and growing wealth. In 2000, the population of the global South stood at an estimated 4.9 billion people; by 2020, that number is expected to hit 6.4 billion. Many of these new inhabitants of planet Earth will be poor and disenfranchised, but most will be workers (in either the formal or informal economy), many will participate in the political process in some way, and some will be entrepreneurs, labor leaders, teachers, criminals, or militants. Whatever the case, they will make their presence felt.

The nations of the South will also play a growing economic role as sources of raw materials in an era of increasing scarcity and founts of entrepreneurial vitality. By one estimate, the combined GDP of the global South (excluding China) will jump from $7.8 trillion in 2005 to $15.8 trillion in 2020, an increase of more than 100%. In particular, many of the prime deposits of oil, natural gas, and the key minerals needed in the global North to keep the industrial system going are facing wholesale depletion after decades of hyper-intensive extraction, leaving only the deposits in the South to be exploited.

Take oil: In 1990, 43% of world daily oil output was supplied by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (the major Persian Gulf producers plus Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Libya, Nigeria, and Venezuela), other African and Latin American producers, and the Caspian Sea countries; by 2020, their share will rise to 58%. A similar shift in the center of gravity of world mineral production will take place, with unexpected countries like Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Niger (a major uranium supplier), and the Democratic Republic of Congo taking on potentially crucial roles.

Inevitably, the global South will also play a conspicuous role in a series of potentially devastating developments. Combine persistent deep poverty, economic desperation, population growth, and intensifying climate degradation and you have a recipe for political unrest, insurgency, religious extremism, increased criminality, mass migrations, and the spread of disease. The global North will seek to immunize itself from these disorders by building fences of every sort, but through sheer numbers alone, the inhabitants of the South will make their presence felt, one way or another.

The Planet Strikes Back

All of this might represent nothing more than the normal changing of the imperial guard on planet Earth, if that planet itself weren’t undergoing far more profound changes than any individual power or set of powers, no matter how strong. The ever more intrusive realities of global warming, resource scarcity, and food insufficiency will, by the end of this century’s second decade, be undeniable and, if not by 2020, then in the decades to come, have the capacity to put normal military and economic power, no matter how impressive, in the shade.

“There is little doubt about the main trends,” Professor Ole Danbolt Mjøs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said in awarding the Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore in December 2007: “More and more scientists have reached ever closer agreement concerning the increasingly dramatic consequences that will follow from global warming.” Likewise, a growing body of energy experts has concluded that the global production of conventional oil will soon reach a peak (if it hasn’t already) and decline, producing a worldwide energy shortage. Meanwhile, fears of future food emergencies, prompted in part by global warming and high energy prices, are becoming more widespread.

All of this was apparent when world leaders met in Copenhagen and failed to establish an effective international regime for reducing the emission of climate-altering greenhouse gases (GHGs). Even though they did agree to keep talking and comply with a non-binding, aspirational scheme to cut back on GHGs, observers believe that such efforts are unlikely to lead to meaningful progress in controlling global warming in the near future. What few doubt is that the pace of climate change will accelerate destructively in the second decade of this century, that conventional (liquid) petroleum and other key resources will become scarcer and more difficult to extract, and that food supplies will diminish in many poor, environmentally vulnerable areas.

Scientists do not agree on the precise nature, timing, and geographical impact of climate-change effects, but they do generally agree that, as we move deeper into the century, we will be seeing an exponential increase in the density of the heat-trapping greenhouse-gas layer in the atmosphere as the consumption of fossil fuels grows and past smokestack emissions migrate to the outer atmosphere. DoE data indicates, for example, that between 1990 and 2005, world carbon dioxide emissions grew by 32%, from 21.5 to 31.0 billion metric tons. It can take as much as 50 years for GHGs to reach the greenhouse layer, which means that their effect will increase even if — as appears unlikely — the nations of the world soon begin to reduce their future emissions.

In other words, the early manifestations of global warming in the first decade of this century — intensifying hurricanes and typhoons, torrential rains followed by severe flooding in some areas and prolonged, even record-breaking droughts in others, melting ice-caps and glaciers, and rising sea levels — will all become more pronounced in the second. As suggested by the IPCC in its 2007 report, uninhabitable dust bowls are likely to emerge in large areas of Central and Northeast Asia, Mexico and the American Southwest, and the Mediterranean basin. Significant parts of Africa are likely to be devastated by rising temperatures and diminished rainfall. More cities are likely to undergo the sort of flooding and destruction experienced by New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And blistering summers, as well as infrequent or negligible rainfall, will limit crop production in key food-producing regions.

Progress will be evident in the development of renewable energy systems, such as wind, solar, and biofuels. Despite the vast sums now being devoted to their development, however, they will still provide only a relatively small share of world energy in 2020. According to DoE projections, renewables will take care of only 10.5% of world energy needs in 2020, while oil and other petroleum liquids will still make up 32.6% of global supplies; coal, 27.1%; and natural gas, 23.8%. In other words, greenhouse gas production will rage on — and, ironically, should it not, thanks to expected shortfalls in the supply of oil, that in itself will likely prove another kind of disaster, pushing up the prices of all energy sources and endangering economic stability. Most industry experts, including those at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, believe that it will be nearly impossible to continue increasing the output of conventional and unconventional petroleum (including tough to harvest Arctic oil, Canadian tar sands, and shale oil) without increasingly implausible fresh investments of trillions of dollars, much of which would have to go into war-torn, unstable areas like Iraq or corrupt, unreliable states like Russia.

In the latest hit movie Avatar, the lush, mineral-rich moon Pandora is under assault by human intruders seeking to extract a fabulously valuable mineral called “unobtainium.” Opposing them are not only a humanoid race called the Na’vi, loosely modeled on Native Americans and Amazonian jungle dwellers, but also the semi-sentient flora and fauna of Pandora itself. While our own planet may not possess such extraordinary capabilities, it is clear that the environmental damage caused by humans since the onset of the Industrial Revolution is producing a natural blowback effect which will become increasingly visible in the coming decade.

These, then, are the four trends most likely to dominate the second decade of this century. Perhaps others will eventually prove more significant, or some set of catastrophic events will further alter the global landscape, but for now expect the dragon ascendant, the eagle descending, the South rising, and the planet possibly trumping all of these.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Owl Books). A documentary film version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation at Bloodandoilmovie.com.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project, author of The End of Victory Culture, and editor of The World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire.]

People’s Democracy wishes its readers a Happy New Year.

It is only customary that as the year ends an evaluation and assessment is made in order to strengthen popular struggles to improve the quality of life for the people in the coming year.

As 21st century’s first decade ends, globally capitalism has exposed its historical limitations with the economic recession continuing. Large scale destruction of wealth, declines in industrial production and global trade has, according to the International Labour Organisation, increased global unemployment by 61 million people enlarging the total to 241 million. This is accompanied by a sharp drop in the medium growth in real average wages of the working people. This declined from 4.3 per cent in 2007 to 1.4 in 2008 and is expected to have dropped even further in 2009. Both these put together have according to the World Bank pushed an additional 89 million people into poverty taking the global figure to above 1.5 billion.

As we have repeatedly noted in these columns since the global capitalist crisis began, a political alternative to capitalism in the form of socialism is the only course open to humanity in order to liberate itself from such oppression and exploitation. The popular struggles to strengthen such a political alternative needs to be intensified in the coming year and decade.

While the Indian ruling classes may be patting themselves on their backs for having remained relatively insulated from global shocks, mainly due to the Left blocking many a financial liberalisation reform under UPA I, the majority of Indians, mainly the poor have been subjected to relentless battering of rising unemployment and high food prices. This obviously has pushed many more people in our country into poverty.

The prime minister struck a very defensive tone at the recent conference of the Indian Economic Association by stating that “the percentage of the population living below the poverty line has certainly not increased.” There is an obvious realisation that the economic policies of liberalisation or reforms has ended in creating two Indias – a Shining and a Suffering. In an admission of guilt of sorts, he said, “based on the available evidence, we can claim that there is no evidence that the new economic policies have had an adverse effect on the poor. He also said “in fact, it (poverty) has continued to decline after the economic reforms atleast at the same rate as it did before”.

This in fact tallies with the latest official estimation of the incidence of poverty. The Suresh Tendulkar Committee, set up by the Planning Commission, has now put out an estimate that over 37 per cent of Indians live in poverty as compared with the existing officially estimated 27.5 per cent. Earlier, the National Commission on Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector estimated on the basis of consumer expenditure data that 78 per cent of Indians are being forced to survive on less than Rs 20 a day. This implies that nearly three- fourths of our population is today living in poverty.

There is a great deal of controversy on the methodology adopted for arriving at correct estimations of poverty. There has been a general tendency of gross underestimation. Notwithstanding this, it is now officially recognised that the number of people living below the poverty line has been growing in absolute numbers.

This also converges with the fact that many a state government has challenged the central government’s estimations of those living below the poverty line (BPL). This has become significant since the budgetary allocations for rural development programmes and the supply of foodgrains to the states from the centre are determined by these estimations. The UPA government’s commitment to the aam aadmi turned out to be more of a deception in the wake of gross underestimation of the BPL population.

Simultaneously, the quality of livelihood of the aam aadmi has sharply declined due to rising food prices — by a whopping 20 per cent this year. Despite all official explanations of a demand supply mismatch, worst monsoon in 37 years etc., the fact remains that the government has completely failed in arresting this runaway inflation. Much of this rise in prices can be attributed to speculative trading in these commodities. Since April 2009 the companies that have invested in food stocks have reported returns ranging from 150 to 300 per cent. Through these columns we had repeatedly pointed out how speculative trading in commodities has been contributing to such inflation. In the single month of June 2008, the total value traded in the commodity exchange was over Rs 15 lakh crores. Such high volumes are traded with the expectation that there will be greater returns. Such greater returns however can only come when the prices of these commodities rise above the levels at which they were when the trade took place.

Therefore, there is no other way to control food prices except to crack down on such speculative trading and by banning the forward/futures trading in all essential commodities. This must be accompanied by strengthening the public distribution system. Unless this is done, the double whammy assault on the aam aadmi cannot be prevented. Given their inherent character, the Indian ruling classes refuse to take such steps. Greater avenues for profit maximisation are created at the expense of imposing further burdens on the people. This once again confirms the fact that the concern for the aam aadmi is nothing but a deception.

Under these circumstances, the prospects of a better livelihood for a vast majority of our people will crucially depend on increased governmental outlays for poverty alleviation programmes. A sharp increase in such allocations appear remote given the large shortfalls in revenues. During the first eight months of this fiscal year, indirect taxes under the three major heads – excise, customs and services – have yielded close to half the budgetary estimation. Similarly, the direct tax receipts have also been less than half of the budget estimate. It is unlikely that these shortfalls will be made up in the last quarter of this fiscal.

The vast majority of Indians can expect an improvement in their livelihood in the coming year only if the UPA government redoubles its efforts to mobilise resources for large public expenditures that can combat both poverty and unemployment. During the last fiscal the government announced that it had foregone legitimate tax revenue to the tune of Rs 4.18 lakh crores. One good way to begin the new year is to resolve not to repeat this and instead transfer this amount to public investments that will both create new jobs and improve the quality of livelihood of our people.

The only way by which the Indian people can achieve this is by strengthening the popular struggles against the UPA government’s economic policies. It is the strength of such popular pressure that must be intensified in the new year so that we can create a better India where the concerns and welfare of the common Indian are addressed in right earnest.

Once again wishing all of you a Happy New Year and the resolve to strengthen popular struggles for creating a better India for its vast majority.

THE Tendulkar Committee had been set up after the March 2009 National Development Council meeting, to look into the methodology for estimating poverty, because there was widespread criticism that the Planning Commission was producing unrealistically low poverty estimates. Further the government using the Commission’s estimates has been claiming large reduction in poverty in both rural and urban India under economic reforms, even though the unemployment situation was getting worse, food grain consumption and cloth consumption were falling, average calorie intake as well as protein intake showed decline and there was considerable agrarian distress.

These official claims of poverty reduction were based on an incorrect method of poverty estimation and in reality, poverty has been rising under reforms in both rural and urban areas, with the rural situation worsening more. By 2004-5 nearly two-thirds of urban persons were in poverty, unable to spend enough to obtain even a modest nutrition standard of 2100 calories energy daily while the rural population similarly was not able to afford the official rural nutrition norm of 2400 calories and the poverty had reached 87 percent, the highest ever in three decades. Since some people think 2400 calories is ‘too high’ for a rural norm even though it is the official norm, we can consider also 2200 calories: 70 percent of rural persons were unable to reach this level compared to 59 percent in 1993-4, so poverty whatever the norm applied, has risen sharply. The official Planning Commission poverty estimates using the same consumption spending data however were very low, only 28.3 per cent rural and 25.7 per cent urban in 2004-5. The public was not informed that the Commission had quietly abandoned its own declared nutrition norms long ago in actual practice, and its low poverty estimates were possible only by taking such unrealistically low ‘poverty lines’ that the nutritional level it permitted by 2004-5 was only 1820 calories rural and 1795 calories urban, far below its own stated norms.

Anyone can do away with poverty on paper simply by lowering the consumption standard against which poverty is measured, and if the lowering goes far enough, estimated poverty will become zero even though in reality it is high and rising. But this is neither an academically correct method nor is it an ethical method of estimating poverty. It is very unfortunate that academics have engaged themselves in such so-called ‘estimation’ procedures which violate logical principles. Suppose that it is claimed by a college that its academic performance has improved dramatically, because the percentage of students who fail the examination every year has reduced from say 40 per cent in 1973 to 15 per cent by 2005. On investigation it is found that the pass mark has been quietly and steadily lowered every five years, without anyone knowing it, from say 50 per cent in 1973 at which 40 per cent of students had failed, to 20 per cent by 2005 at which 15 per cent of students failed. However the real proportion of failures (those unable to get the 50 percent mark) has gone up. Clearly the claim of improved performance is false because we cannot validly compare figures over time when the standard itself is altered. Lowering the standard will produce automatic decline in the proportion of failures but this is a false decline. And no one can respect the people who follow such an illogical procedure, which becomes unethical to boot when improved performance is claimed on its basis.

Official poverty estimation suffers from exactly the same problem. While theoretically the definition of poverty line is that which observes total monthly spending on all goods and services whose food spending part allowes a person to obtain the nutrition norm, the actual practice of estimation by the Commission was different. It applied its own definition only once, for the year 1973-4 to calculate correct poverty lines, Rs 49 for rural India and Rs 56.4 for urban India at which the nutrition requirements were satisfied. After that it has never applied the correct definition so every poverty line and poverty percentage it gave from 1978 onwards has been incorrect. It calculated the later poverty lines by applying a rural and urban consumer price index to these sums, Rs 49 and Rs 56.4, to update them to later years the latest being 2004-5. But the consumer price index does not measure the cost of living correctly, as a result the poverty lines were more and more understated, and repeated lowering has taken place in the nutrition level which can be actually obtained at these more and more understated poverty lines. The true poverty lines which I call the direct poverty lines at which the nutrition norms can be obtained, are more than double the official ones by 2004-5.

The reader can refer to the Tables to see that because the poverty lines were increasingly lower the calorie intake obtainable at these poverty lines has been lowered continuously from the original level to around 1800 by 2005. The lower the poverty line, the lower will be the percentage of persons falling below it. This is the reason for the official claim of ‘poverty decline’ which is not only spurious but is unethical. The process of underestimation has been going on for thirty years so by 2005 the official poverty lines have become nothing but a joke, at Rs 12 per day rural and Rs18 per day urban. They measure destitution, not poverty. But these increasingly underestimated poverty lines were very convenient for a government wishing to claim improved performance and poverty reduction under economic reforms even though the reality was the opposite. Continuously lowering the standard meant that automatically the proportion of persons below the altering standard, would decline by 10 percentage points every decade regardless of what was actually happening to poverty at the ground level. The official figures would always show decline even if actually poverty was rising as it has been when we measure it correctly by keeping the standard (the nutrition norms) constant. (Only the 1980s were relatively better and urban poverty in reality did see a very small decline).

The Tendulkar Committee had a golden opportunity to correct the estimation procedure and regain the ethical position the Commission has lost. But unfortunately it has chosen to throw away the opportunity and stay with the bogus procedure, which is fundamentally disloyal to the interests of the Indian people since it automatically produces false poverty reduction when the ground reality is the opposite. The Committee has retained the existing grossly unrealistic urban poverty line of Rs 18 per day (by taking the mixed-recall-period it is raised by Re1 per day but this does not affect nutrition since the extra spending is on non-food items). It betrays the interests of the Indian people by explicitly justifying the lowering of the urban nutrition standard to 1795 calories actually obtainable at this poverty line, from the earlier 2100 calories norm, saying that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has declared below 1800 calories to be an adequate norm for India. But 1800 calories is much lower than the norm it had given earlier and much lower than the norms which continue to be applied to more developed countries. So, in effect we are being told by the Committee that Indians deserve hunger and should learn to live with it. But who is the FAO to dictate what an adequate nutrition standard for urban Indians should be? And why should the Planning Commission give up the 2100 calories norm which had been set after careful consideration by a nutrition expert group on the basis of the Indian Council for Medical Research recommendations? This is simply trying to justify the unjustifiable, the steady lowering of the standard which has produced the false urban poverty decline in the economic reforms period because the urban poverty line has been lowered to a level allowing below 1800 calories per day. In the states of Assam, Punjab and Kerala the official urban poverty lines are even lower than the average and allowed calorie intake of only 1485,1435 and 1300 calories respectively. Can the Tendulkar Committee dare to justify these levels by appealing to FAO authority?

The Tendulkar Committee’s only attempt to appease criticism is to raise the poverty line for rural India from just below Rs 12 per day to Rs13.8 per day on a comparable basis to the earlier poverty lines (on mixed recall basis it is raised by a further Re1 per day but this is not relevant for the nutrition standard since it is the extra recorded spending on non-food items). This raises the rural poverty percentage to 41.8 for 2004-5. It has reworked the poverty percentage for 1993-4 to be 50.1 thus obtaining the same order of ‘decline’ in poverty as before over the reforms period. Those who are hailing the rise in the rural poverty estimate to 41.8 as a positive move, do not realise that in a matter of a mere 12 to 15 months from now, when the results of the 66th Round data for 2009-10 become available, the Planning Commission will once more claim rural poverty reduction from its new 41.8 percent to, at an informed guess, around 35-36 percent. In reality rural poverty would have risen in the last five years given the effects of world recession and of rapid food price inflation. But the Commission will estimate and claim poverty reduction nevertheless just as before, because it has retained fully the basic logical error in its estimation procedure. In fact the new method suggested by the Tendulkar Committee of calculating price indices with a lower weight for food is likely to understate the actual rise in the cost of living, to an even greater extent than earlier price indices did.

What is the task of the progressive movement? First and foremost, its intellectuals should try to consciously inoculate themselves against the virus of academic corruption – of accepting logically incorrect estimation methods uncritically and thereby betraying the interests of the mass of the Indian people, merely because those misguidedly engaged in making these incorrect estimates happen to be their own peers, or their friends. What the hapless and increasing impoverished mass of our people need are organic intellectuals who are strong enough to think independently and rigorously, and not be hegemonised themselves by the pervasive intellectual dishonesty or contaminated by the opportunism which is rampant in the corridors of state power. Second, the objective conditions of rapid food price rise and loss of employment under global recession, is raising poverty and reducing further the access to basic necessities for the bulk of the population. Campaigns are necessary to grow more foodgrains, operate an expanded and universal public procurement and distribution system, curb price speculation, take measures to stabilise prices to grower and consumer, raise purchasing power through more thorough implementation of employment guarantee including urban employment schemes which are necessary given the continuing rise in urban poverty.

Table 1

Rural Poverty in India, All-India 1983 to 2004-5 including revised estimates by Tendulkar Committee

Note : The poverty lines marked with asterix, are comparable with other official poverty lines in the Table. These PLs correspond to the revised poverty percentages for 1993-4 and 2004-5 presented in the Tendulkar Report, and have been obtained by this author from the ogives for the two years. The MRP poverty line for 1993-4 will be about Rs, 255.

Table 2

Urban Poverty in India 1973-4 to 2004-5

The report of the expert group on the estimation of poverty led by Professor Suresh Tendulkar has been submitted to the Planning Commission. Apart from issues of comparability of data across NSS rounds, the most important ToR for the committee was to “review alternative conceptualizations of poverty, and the associated technical aspects of procedures of measurement and database for empirical estimation” of poverty in India.

Poverty, of course, is a multi-dimensional concept. However, official statistics in India have always referred, arguably narrowly, to only income poverty (using the proxy measure of consumption expenditure from the NSSO surveys). In India, we have been using a calorie-based procedure to fix the poverty line as the minimum level of expenditure that would enable a person to purchase a specified food basket. A task force of the Planning Commission in 1979 defined the poverty line as that per capita expenditure at which the average per capita per day calorie intake was 2400 calories in rural areas and 2100 calories in urban areas. This task force used age-sex-activity specific calorie allowances recommended by a Nutrition Expert Group in 1968 to estimate the average daily per capita calorie requirements for rural and urban areas. Estimates of average expenditure incurred by that population in each State that consumed these quantities of calories as per the 1973-74 survey of NSSO were fixed as poverty lines.

Based on the observed consumer behaviour in 1973-74, it was estimated by the task force that an expenditure of Rs 49.09 per capita per month was associated with a calorie intake of 2400 per capita per day in rural areas and Rs 56.64 per capita per month with a calorie intake of 2100 per day in urban areas. These poverty lines were updated for future years by simply accounting for the changes in consumer price indices. As such, the all-India poverty lines updated for 2004-05 were Rs 356.30 in rural areas and Rs 538.60 in urban areas, all per capita per month. The shares of population below these poverty lines (the head count ratios; HCR) were estimated to be 28.7 per cent in rural areas and 25.9 per cent in urban areas.

These estimates of poverty threw up a number of controversies. First, the NSSO estimates of poverty were arrived at using poverty lines that were extremely low in levels. An amount of Rs 356.30 per month per person amounted to just Rs 11.90 per day in rural areas, which was at best a destitute income. The fact that about one-fourth of India’s population did not incur even this level of expenditure was in itself a revealing point.

Secondly, the levels of poverty and deprivation reported from independent surveys, including village surveys, were far higher than the NSSO estimates of poverty.

Thirdly, the NSSO estimates were at great variance with estimates of nutritional outcomes that other surveys like the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) provided. For instance, according to the NFHS-3 in 2005-06, the share of underweight children (under 3 years) in rural India was 44 per cent and the share of stunted children in rural India was 41 per cent. Among women in the age group of 15 to 49 years, 58 per cent were aneamic and 39 per cent had below normal body mass index (BMI).

Fourthly, there were major methodological issues involved in the use of consumer price indices, continuously re-weighted keeping the 1973-74 consumption basket unchanged, to update the poverty lines over time. The consumption basket of rural and urban persons had changed significantly after 1973-74. One striking absurdity that resulted was that in some States, urban poverty rates were estimated to be higher than the rural poverty rates.

The Tendulkar committee has reviewed the present methodology for measuring poverty and has suggested major changes for the future. These changes may be crudely summarised as follows:

1) Given the poor correlation between calorie consumption levels and nutritional outcomes, the calorie-norm for estimating the poverty line should be abandoned. Instead, the committee has suggested a new method.

2) This new method involves the consideration of the present all-India urban poverty line as the basis for every other poverty line. This consideration is justified on the basis of two independent validating reasons:

(a) The population that corresponded in 2004-05 to the poverty line expenditure in urban areas consumed 1776 calories per capita per day, which was close to the calorie norm of 1800 calories per capita per day suggested for India by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

(b) The actual levels of per capita expenditure in urban areas in 2004-05 were also sufficient to meet a defined “normative level of expenditure on education and health services”.

3) The all-India urban poverty line has to be consistently estimated based on the mixed reference period method (using a combined 365 days and 30 days recall) rather than the present uniform reference period method (using a uniform 30 day recall).

4) With the present all-India urban poverty line as the basis, the Committee has recommended the identification of its parity levels at the State-level for rural and urban areas separately. Thus, applying purchasing power parity (PPP), separate rural and urban poverty lines are to be estimated for each State at which the levels of consumption in the urban areas can be sustained.

5) It is thus postulated that the new poverty lines, fortuitously, meet not just food expenditure requirements, but also those of education and health that are important basic needs.

Using the above method, the new poverty lines for 2004-05 have been re-estimated by the committee as Rs 446.68 for rural areas and Rs 578.80 for urban areas (per capita per month). Using these poverty lines, the HCRs in 2004-05 were estimated as 41.8 per cent in rural areas and 25.7 per cent in urban areas. These new estimates are an upward revision in rural areas from 28.7 per cent as per the old method, and a slight downward revision in urban areas from 25.9 per cent as per the old method. The upward revision in the rural areas is due to the use of the PPP method, which has reduced the urban-rural price differentials implicit in the present method of estimation.

The upward revision of rural poverty by the committee is indeed a welcome step, as this would help States to expand their BPL coverage in the public distribution system (PDS) using grains from the central quota itself. It is also welcome that non-food expenditures like those on education and health have not just been included (in fact, there was an allowance in the earlier method too), but also that provisions have been made to update them across time. However, these steps solve only a part of the problem, as the system of targeting in welfare schemes like the PDS is likely to remain in place and large sections of poor people above the new poverty line would remain outside targeted welfare provisions.

Take an example: the new poverty line for rural areas has been revised from Rs 356.30 per capita per month to Rs 446.68 per capita per month. In daily terms, this means an increase from Rs 12 to Rs 15 per capita. This is just a meager upward revision. For urban areas too, the increase is meager; the revision of poverty line is from Rs 538.60 per capita per month (Rs 18 per day) to Rs 578.8 per capita per month (Rs19 per day). In other words, the new poverty line continues to be extremely low in levels and keep a large section of the population outside the definition of the “poor”.

Juxtapose this with the fact that 77 per cent of the population lived at less than Rs 16 per day with respect to expenditure in 2004-05. In 2004-05, the average MPCE of those households with expenditure less than double the poverty line (i.e., of the 77 per cent; the “poor and vulnerable”, as classified by the NCEUS report) was only Rs 486, or Rs 16 per day. If the average expenditure stands at Rs 16 per day, there is likely to be a sizeable section of the population above the newly suggested poverty line of Rs 15 per day in rural areas and Rs 19 per day in urban areas. In a targeted welfare provision, these sections of the population would remain to be excluded.

Another central question is whether abandoning the calorie norm is a wise step or not. It is true that calorie intakes were poorly correlated with nutritional outcomes (as in the famous case of Kerala). However, abandoning the calorie norm altogether and taking solace from the fact that calorie intakes appear to be adequate at the new poverty lines is an overstretched and arbitrary proposition. It is unclear whether there is any basis, theoretical or empirical, for this relationship to hold at all the years to come.

The Tendulkar Committee report is the latest input to the “Great Indian Poverty Debate”. The reason for the rising contestation around poverty data in the recent years is the use of HCRs to arbitrarily fix the number of households eligible for many important welfare benefits, such as the PDS. In this method, the questions of estimation of the number of poor and the identification of the poor remained separate processes, and were thus open to bizarre policy outcomes. It is for the absence of a reliable method of combining estimation and identification that political and social movements have been demanding universalisation of welfare provisions like the PDS. The Tendulkar Committee report itself is evidence to the fact that levels of poverty are extremely sensitive to even minor changes in the poverty line.

While the increase in the number of poor households, as suggested by the Tendulkar Committee, may indeed help expand the coverage of welfare schemes, it would still fall short of including all the needy sections from the ambit of such schemes. One would welcome the newly suggested methodology for arriving at a strictly technical measure of poverty. However, it is important to insist that the new estimates are not mechanically linked to the issue of eligibility to access major welfare schemes. In a country with such mass poverty as India, universalisation remains the most efficient tool for ensuring livelihood security.

We, the countries that make up ALBA, denounce before the world the threat that the results of the United Nations Conference in Copenhagen pose for the destiny of humanity.

In the first place, the process of negotiations was corrupted by the violation of the essential principles of the multilateral system. This undemocratic process has not recognised the equality of all, was dishonest, not very transparent, and exclusive. It was designed to guarantee the positions of a small group of countries.

Our response to climate change must be in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter. This process has lacked legitimacy; it has violated all the principles of multilateralism and the United Nations Charter, above all those of sovereign equality between all countries.

The main characteristic of this unfortunate failed meeting is that a very small group of countries, coordinated and convoked by Denmark, have been for the last few weeks writing an accord that they have unilaterally named “Interested parties”, excluding the large majority of the world, establishing first class and second class countries as criteria.

While the chair of the Summit sent countries to take up the groups again, in order to continue editing and cleaning up the texts that were approved by the particpants as a basis of negotiation, at the same time, the Danish prime minister convoked the presidents of a group of countries to edit a document behind our backs.

Further evidence of the exclusive nature of this event is the call of a group of Presidents behind closed doors, without participation of the majority and without explaining the criteria behind the selection.

It’s clear that we can’t consider the issue of climate change without considering changing the system. The model of capitalist production and consumption is bringing life on the planet to the point of no return and to a crucial moment in human history, and the debate in these situations can’t be reduced to the economic interests of a small group.

Until now very little has been achieved, however it is important to preserve the current climate agreements: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. They are important platforms for advancing the defence of life. Here we have an important world political accord, where all of us agree that climate change is a problem that has to be urgently addressed, and where the countries who are historically responsible for the problem have agreed to commit themselves to reducing emissions by amounts that allow the problem to be addressed.

The current scenario is seeing all this take a big step backwards, and requires us to forget the Kyoto Protocol. In this summit we haven’t managed to write accords that address the obligations of the developed countries: to establish aims of reducing emissions or to establish a second period of commitments for the Kyoto Protocol.

There are offers on the table, but none of them compare. The United States doesn’t want to commit itself on the basis of the efforts of other developed countries. The developed countries came to this meeting with a prior agenda, and they are violating every democratic proceeding in their attempt to impose it.

In the Bali Plan of Action, approved in 2007, it was agreed that the developed countries would have obligations of mitigation, to which they would add voluntary actions of mitigation of the developing countries.

Now, the developed countries have dedicated themselves to misunderstanding the Bali Plan over the last two years, in order to try to use this manifestation of our will to unite our efforts as a way of transferring their obligations to us. The efforts and will to mitigate of the developing countries can’t be used as a way to manipulate us and tell us, after they have destroyed the world, that now its our turn to mitigate so that they can continue contaminating and destroying on the basis of their patterns of exploitation, production, and consumption.

There is also the issue of principles here. We, the developing countries, are dignified and sovereign nations and victims of a problem that we didn’t cause. This moral principle, based on historic responsibility, is the reason why the developed countries should provide sufficient resources for the complete implementation of the principles of the Convention.

The environmental crisis as a result of the increased temperatures of the atmosphere is a consequence of the capitalist system, of the prolonged and unsustainable pattern of production and consumption of the developed countries, of the application and imposition of an absolutely predatory model of development on the rest of the world, and the lack of political will for the full and effective fulfilment of the commitments and obligations of the Kyoto Protocol.

Developed countries have over exploited the atmospheric space. This climatic debt in the widest framework of ecological debt includes an emission debt as much as it includes an adaptation debt that should be honoured by developed countries. It’s not about charity or a handout, but a judicially bound obligation.

Category 1 countries accumulated a total of $1,123 billion in military expenses in 2008. The United States spent $711 billion in 2008, according to the budget for the 2009 financial year, which includes $170 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the world knows that they have the capacity, but what they don’t have is the political desire to respond to their international commitments and obligations to struggle against climate change. They are trying to use and abuse the needs of the poorest in order to force illegal accords.

Today, through the carbon markets, those who cause climate change, continue contaminating, while the weight of emissions reductions transfers to the developing countries. They thought that in Copenhagen they could convince us to buy their right to contaminate, in exchange offering promises of paltry amounts of money.

1. We strongly denounce and we request that the documents generated by the chair of the summit without the mandate of the participants, be contested, and that we can state our position against the groups of friends of the chair openly. The chair has not guaranteed equality of participation at all levels, including the presidential level.

2. We reiterate our commitment to the struggle against climate change and to the principles of the Kyoto Protocol, now more valid than ever, whose content we consider capable of improvement with the decisions of the participants, and subsequent accords, but something that we shouldn’t allow to die. The complexity of the recent negotiations has shown us that the economic interests in conflict wont allow an accord if the developing countries won’t accept respect for the principles.

3. In this sense, we express our political desire to continue working in the framework of the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. The relaunch of these negotiations should be based on respect, inclusion, transparency, and legitimacy.

4. We recall that while the conference failed in an irreversible way, the voices of the youth who know that the future is theirs, grows stronger. They strongly denounce the manoeuvres of the developed countries and they know that the struggle will continue. We join with them and their protests, and we salute and support them. The people must stay on their guard.

Today more than ever, before the lamentable manoeuvring that has been practiced in Copenhagen for petty economic interests, we reiterate that, “Don’t change the climate, change the system!”.

Translated by Tamara Pearson for Venezuelanalysis.com

Climate change is already causing enormous damage and hundreds of millions of poor people are enduring the consequences.

The most advanced research centers have claimed that there is little time to avoid an irreversible catastrophe. James Hansen, from the NASA Goddard Institute, has said that a proportion of 350 parts of carbon dioxide by million is still tolerable; however, the figure today is 390 and growing at a pace of 2 parts by million every year exceeding the levels of 600 thousand years ago. Each one of the past two decades has been the warmest since the first records were taken while carbon dioxide increased 80 parts by million in the past 150 years.

The meltdown of ice in the Artic Sea and of the huge two-kilometer thick icecap covering Greenland; of the South American glaciers feeding its main fresh water sources and the enormous volume covering the Antarctic; of the remaining icecap on the Kilimanjaro, the ice on the Himalayan and the large frozen area of Siberia are visible. Outstanding scientists fear abrupt quantitative changes in these natural phenomena that bring about the change.

Humanity entertained high hopes in the Copenhagen Summit after the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997 entered into force in 2005. The resounding failure of the Summit gave rise to shameful episodes that call for due clarification.

The United States, with less than 5% of the world population releases 25% of the carbon dioxide. The new US President had promised to cooperate with the international effort to tackle a new problem that afflicts that country as much as the rest of the world. In the meetings leading to the Summit, it became clear that the leaders of that nation and of the wealthiest countries were maneuvering to place the burden of sacrifices on the emergent and poor countries.

A great number of leaders and thousands of representatives of social movements and scientific institutions, determined to fight for the preservation of humanity from the greatest risk in history, converged in Copenhagen on the invitation of the organizers of the Summit. I’d rather avoid reference to details of the brutality of the Danish police force against thousands of protesters and invitees from social and scientific movements who traveled to the Danish capital. I’ll focus on the political features of the Summit.

Actually, chaos prevailed in Copenhagen where incredible things happened. The social movements and scientific institutions were not allowed to attend the debates. There were heads of State and Government who could not even express their views on crucial issues. Obama and the leaders of the wealthiest nations took over the conference, with the complicity of the Danish government. The United Nations agencies were pushed to the background.

Barack Obama, the last to arrive on the day of the Summit for a 12-hours stay, met with two groups of invitees carefully chosen by him and his staff, and in the company of one of them met at the plenary hall with the rest of the high-level delegations. He made his remarks and left right away trough the back door. Except for the small group chosen by him, the other representatives of countries were prevented from taking the floor during that plenary session. The presidents of Bolivia and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela were allowed to speak because the Chairman of the Summit had no choice but to give them the floor in light of the strong pressures of those present.

In an adjacent room, Obama brought together the leaders of the wealthiest nations, some of the most important emerging States and two very poor countries. He then introduced a document, negotiated with two or three of the most important countries, ignored the UN General Assembly, gave a press conference and left like Julius Caesar after one of his victorious wars in Asia Minor that led him to say: “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

Even Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, had said on October 19: “If we do not reach a deal over the next few months, let us be in no doubt, since once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement in some future period can undo that choice. By then it will be irretrievably too late…”

Brown concluded his speech with these dramatic words: “We cannot afford to fail. If we fail now we will pay a heavy price. If we act now, if we act together, if we act with vision and resolve, success at Copenhagen is still within our reach, but, if we falter, the Earth will itself be at risk and, for the planet, there is no Plan B.”

But later he arrogantly said that the United Nations could not be taken hostage by a group of countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Tuvalu. At the same time, he accused China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other emerging countries of being lured by the United States into signing a document that throws the Kyoto Protocol in the wastebasket without a binding agreement involving the United States and its wealthy allies.

I find it necessary to recall that the United Nations Organization was born hardly six decades ago, after the last World War, when there were no more than fifty independent countries. Today, after the hateful colonial system ceased to exist thanks to the resolute struggle of the peoples, it has a membership of over 190 independent nations. For many years, even the People’s Republic of China was denied admission to the UN while a puppet regime was its representative in that institution and in the privileged Security Council.

The tenacious support of the growing number of Third World nations would prove indispensable to China’s international recognition and become an extremely significant element for the acceptance of that country’s rights at the UN by the United States and its NATO allies.

It was the Soviet Union that made the greatest contribution to the heroic fight against fascism. More than 25 million of its people perished while the country was terribly devastated. It was from that struggle that it emerged as a superpower with the capacity to partly balance the absolute domination of the US imperial system and the former colonial powers to plunder the Third World countries unrestrictedly. Following the demise of the USSR, the United States extended its political and military power to the East, –up to Russia’s heart– and enhanced its influence on the rest of Europe. Therefore, what happened in Copenhagen came as no surprise.

I want to insist on how unfair and outrageous were the remarks of the Prime Minister of the UK and the Yankee attempt to impose as the Summit Accord a document that was at no time discussed with the attending countries.

During his press conference of December 21, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez made a statement that cannot be disproved. I will quote from some of its paragraphs: “I would like to emphasize that no agreement of the Conference of the Parties was reached in Copenhagen, that no decision was made as to binding or nonbinding commitments or pertaining to International Law; that simply did not happen. There was no agreement in Copenhagen.”

“The Summit was a failure and a deception for the world […] the lack of political will was left in the open…”

“…it was a step backward in the actions of the international community to prevent or mitigate the effects of climate change…”

“…the average world temperature could rise by 5 degrees…”

Right then our Foreign Minister adds other interesting data on the likely consequences of climate change according to the latest scientific research.

“…from the Kyoto Protocol until today the developed countries’ emissions rose by 12.8%… and 55% of that volume corresponds to the United States.”

“The average annual oil consumption is 25 barrels for an American, 11 barrels for a European, less than 2 barrels for a Chinese and less than 1 barrel for a Latin American or Caribbean citizen.”

“Thirty countries, including those of the European Union, are consuming 80% of the fuel produced.”

The fact is that the developed countries signatories of the Kyoto Protocol increased their emissions dramatically. Now, they want to replace the adopted bases of the emissions from 1990 with those of 2005. This means that the United States, which is the main source of emissions, would be reducing its emissions of 25 years ago in only 3%. It is a shameful mockery of the world public opinion.

The Cuban foreign minister, speaking on behalf of a group of ALBA member countries, defended China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other important emerging-economies states. He stressed the concept adopted in Kyoto that “common but differentiated responsibilities mean that the responsibility of the historical accumulators and the developed countries, who are the culprits of this catastrophe, differs from that of the small island states and the South countries, above all the least developed…”

“Responsibility means financing; responsibility means technology transfer on adequate terms. But, at this point, Obama resorts to a game of words and instead of talking of common but differentiated responsibilities, he speaks of ‘common but differentiated responses.’”

“…he then leaves the plenary hall without taking the trouble of listening to anybody; he had neither listened to anybody before taking the floor.”

In a subsequent press conference, before departing from the Danish capital, Obama had said: “There has been a meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen. For the first time in history, the largest economies have come to jointly accept responsibilities.”

In his clear and irrefutable presentation, our Foreign Minister said: “What does it mean that ‘the largest economies have come to jointly accept responsibilities’? It means that they are placing a large part of the burden of financing the relief and adaptation of countries, mostly the South countries, to climate change on China, Brazil, India and South Africa. Because it must be said that in Copenhagen we witnessed an assault, a holdup against China, Brazil, India and South Africa, and against every other euphemistically called developing country.”

These were the resounding and undeniable words used by our Foreign Minister to describe what happened in Copenhagen.

I must add that, when at 10:00 a.m. on December 19 our Vicepresident Esteban Lazo and the Cuban Foreign Minister had already left, a belated attempt was made to resurrect the Copenhagen cadaver as a Summit Accord. At that moment, practically every head of State had left and there was hardly any minister around. Again, the denunciation by the remaining members of the delegations from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and other countries could defeat the maneuver. That was the end of the inglorious Summit.

Another fact that should not be overlooked is that at the most critical moment of that day, in the wee small hours, the Cuban Foreign Minister, together with the delegations waging the honorable battle, offered UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon their cooperation in the ever harder struggle being fought as well as in future efforts necessary to preserve the life of our species.

The environmental group Wild World Fund has warned that if emissions are not drastically reduced climate change will go unchecked in the next 5 to 10 years.

But there is no need to prove the substance of what is said here that Obama did.

The US President stated on Wednesday, December 23, that people are justified in being disappointed about the outcome of the Summit on Climate Change. In an interview with the CBS television network, the President said that “instead of a total collapse if nothing had been done, which would have been a huge step backward; at least we could remain more or less where we were…”

According to the press dispatch, Obama is the target of most criticism from the countries that nearly unanimously feel that the result of the Summit was disastrous.

Now, the UN is in a quandary since many countries would find it humiliating to ask others to adhere to the arrogant and antidemocratic accord.

To carry on with the battle and to claim in every meeting, particularly in those of Bonn and Mexico, humanity’s right to life, with the morale and the strength that truth provides, is in my opinion the only way to proceed.

Fidel Castro Ruz

December 26, 2009

8:15 p.m.

THE Copenhagen Climate Conference has ended without achieving anything, the only saving grace being that things could have been even worse. People’s expectations that this meeting of world leaders would finalise a legally binding global arrangement to rescue humanity from calamitous climate change have been rudely dashed. Frustration, anger and disappointment are widespread, but not surprise, since many had predicted just such an outcome including in these columns.

No agreement was reached on targets for deep and binding emission cuts by developed countries. No firm commitments were made regarding finance and technology transfers to help developing countries cope with climate change, or on mechanisms and measures for effective implementation. None of these were in fact on the agenda of at least some countries at Copenhagen.

EFFORTS TO KILL KYOTO

From day one, the US and its developed country allies made a planned and systematic effort to kill the Kyoto protocol itself, remove the crucial distinction in the global treaty architecture between industrialised and developing countries, and decisively shift the burden of reducing global emissions on to developing countries. They have half-way succeeded in these attempts and it was only the determined and united resistance of the developing countries that prevented the complete subversion and formal dismantling of the Kyoto treaty, although this unity too started fraying at the edges towards the end.

Just as the conference was about to close in complete disarray, a so-called “Copenhagen Accord” was drawn up by the US along with the BASIC group of Brazil, South Africa, India and China, with the assistance of 22 other countries drawn from all continents and groupings. The accord is in the nature of a political agreement with no legal force or approval by the conference and, as such, its very operational status is very much in doubt. Even though it was widely perceived to be weak, flawed and dangerously open to differing interpretations, it was finally supported, however reluctantly, by most countries and blocs as providing at least some basis for future negotiations. Without this accord, the Copenhagen conference would have closed not only with no agreement but also with no future direction and perhaps even no hope of ever attaining a global pact. This would have suited the US and other developed countries who have always, and in all contexts, opposed internationally binding agreements since, under a laissez faire dispensation, they can carry on with business-as-usual and impose their will upon others through bilateral and multilateral arrangements. The accord should be seen as merely an instrument to keep the ball in play so that the game is still on.

SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES

No one can seriously call what transpired at Copenhagen “negotiations” since the term assumes parties willing to move from earlier stated positions and converging towards a common one. Developed countries, led by the US, did not budge an inch from their emission reduction pledges made several months before Copenhagen, even though these were far below the 40 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2020 as called for by the IPCC and despite knowing full well that this would condemn hundreds of millions of people especially in the developing countries to grievous deprivation or even death due to climate change.

The US stayed at their pathetic three per cent, the Japanese at roughly the same and even the EU did not raise their 20 per cent to 30 per cent as they had promised to consider.

As UN secretary general Ban-Ki Moon put it, “Nature does not negotiate with us.” IPCC has warned that the window of opportunity to prevent runaway climate change and irreversible damage is small and narrowing with each passing day. Indeed, since the release of IPCC’s Fourth Report in mid-2007, evidence has been mounting that the situation is deteriorating even more rapidly than earlier believed. A secret UN report released during the conference showed that, with the low emission cuts pledged by developed countries at Copenhagen, global emissions would not peak (i.e. reach maximum) by 2015 and then start declining as required, which would mean that global temperature rise could reach 3 degrees C by 2050, not 2 degrees as repeatedly promised.

But in effect, therefore, the world is now where it was before Copenhagen, teetering on the brink of runaway climate change, hanging on by a frail thread offered by the Accord which, as we shall see, is like a minefield, strewn with traps for the unwary. But the game will not be just about the right words but about power equations and purposeful negotiations to bring about the best results. The world is replete with treaties crafted with the best of intentions but which are manipulated and twisted to suit the interests of the US and other forces of global capital. In the months to come, India and other developing countries will have to carefully work their way through the minefield in order to reach the goal of an internationally binding climate treaty.

A great deal of introspection, based on experience of the past few months, and during the Copenhagen conference itself, is called for. The failure of the conference to extract deeper cuts from developed countries, and of negotiations leading up to it including the tactics adopted by large developing countries, must rank uppermost among the aspect s calling for analysis. A few other salient features are discussed below.

TOWARDS A NEW TREATY?

US president Barack Obama’s take-it-or-leave-it speech at the conference shattered his carefully cultivated messianic image and the illusions of many. At Copenhagen, his smiling “Yes, We Can” slogan changed to a grim “No, We Won’t.” Obama told the conference he had come “not to talk but to act,” but all he did was to say that the US had done whatever it had to and had nothing more to offer. He also pushed the US agenda of dismantling the Kyoto protocol and called upon developing countries to forget the past (meaning historical responsibility of developed countries for high atmospheric GHG concentrations, 30 per cent contributed by the US alone) and leave behind the “fault lines… we’ve been imprisoned by… and the same divisions that have stood in the way of action for years” (meaning differentiated responsibilities and equitable sharing of the global atmospheric commons) leading therefore to the conclusion that “all major economies… must reduce their emissions,” once again removing the crucial Kyoto distinction between industrialised and developing countries.

It was difficult to believe that two years had gone by since the Bali Action Plan was drawn up and two ad-hoc working groups, one on the Kyoto protocol (AWG-KP) for enhanced emission reduction commitments by developed countries and the other on long-term cooperative action (AWG-LCA) towards achievement of broader and longer-term goals, were set up. These two working groups had held extensive consultations with national governments, experts and civil society organisations around the world in order to promote a convergence of views and prepare draft negotiating texts for Copenhagen. Yet all this work was rudely and arrogantly cast aside by the US and its allies, ably aided by the Danish chair of the conference who manipulated the proceedings in such a way that discussions on the KP track were completely sidelined while all discussions focused on the LCA track. The aim was clearly to bypass the Kyoto protocol with its differentiated targets for developed and developing countries, and to work on a single track that would later be converted into a new treaty.

It took two walkouts by African delegates, with India playing intermediary in the second instance (Indian negotiators were at pains to point out that they had not actually joined the boycott), for the conference chair to even nominally restore the twin-track discussions. It was only in the last couple of days, just prior to the arrival of the heads of government, that a virtual complete revolt on the conference floor by all developing countries finally forced the issue but by that time the stalemate was set in concrete.

POOR TACTICS

It is a matter of some surprise why these moves by the US and its allies, actively aided by the Danish chair, were not nipped in the bud at the very outset in the opening days of the conference rather than being allowed to overwhelm the Conference to the point of completely undermining it. The official and often reiterated Indian position that it did not want to take issues with anybody but would adopt a constructive role offers some clue. In Copenhagen, cooperation was taken for, and to a great extent translated into, acquiescence.

In fact, if one looks back to developments over the past few years going back to even before Bali, it would seem that India and other large developing countries have paid a heavy price for going along with supposedly “consensus” formulations of the US and other G7 countries in earlier meetings of the G8 plus G5. This is not just hindsight. As regular readers of these columns would know, warning bells had been sounded even at those junctures in reviews of climate discussions at these meetings. Joint statements of the G8 plus G5 on aspirational goals of limiting global warming to 2 degrees C and collaborative efforts to combat climate change were issued at the G8 summits at Heiligendamm in Germany in mid-2007, at Toyako in Japan in 2008 and at the so-called “Major Economies Forum” in L’Aquila, Italy earlier this year. While India basked in the supposed glory of dining at the high table of global powers, and others thought these had brought about a gradual shift in the US position, these statements implicitly put forward the idea that the US, other developed countries and India along with other large developing countries were all sailing in the same boat. All these came back to haunt the Copenhagen conference. The dangers contained in the “Copenhagen accord” should therefore be looked at in this light as well.

The mostly unilateral commitments by developing countries such as China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia prior to Copenhagen, which they were not obliged to do under the Kyoto protocol, also need to be re-examined. To some commentators these declarations appeared to have enabled these large developing countries to seize the moral high ground. However, as events unfolded it became clear that, again as forewarned in these columns, they were used by the developed nations to their advantage. The US and allies merely kept pushing the developing countries to cut more, or to concede more ground for instance as regards monitoring and verification, while themselves refusing to increase their emission reduction commitments. The leaked UN report revealed that the mitigation actions volunteered by developing countries amounting to 5.2 billion tonnes of GHGs was considerably more that the emissions cuts pledged by the developed countries amounting to reduction of just 2.1-3.4 billion tonnes! Since the commitments by developing countries were made unilaterally, not conditional upon reciprocal action and deep cuts by developed nations, there was no pressure on the latter. In fact, the US and others also took the opportunity to put a further spin on this saying developing countries had made no concessions at Copenhagen, conveniently glossing over the fact that all these major concessions had been made before!

LOOKING AHEAD

The real task now lies ahead, hopefully with lessons learnt. First the minefield of the Copenhagen accord. The mines are in plain sight but still need careful navigation to avoid tripping over them and setting them off.

At the very outset, there is no date set in the accord itself for arriving at a global and legally binding treaty. The earlier reference to the next conference in Mexico City in December 2010 has been deleted in the final version. First priority should be to prioritise this goal which, though, is implied in references to the LCA Working Group Report which contains it. Failing this, this will be only an open-ended “national pledge-based” agreement as the US has been pushing for with a review only in 2015.

Targets for global emissions, or for a peaking year, have been left out, not just in the accord but even during negotiations and especially by India which has pretended that that these are of no concern! There is perhaps a fear that, if global emission limits such as 50 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050, or a peaking year of not later than 2015, are mentioned, this will be used by developed countries to adopt low targets for themselves and thrust the balance on to developing countries. But this is where linkages with developed country targets and reciprocal actions come in and should be insisted on. Two degrees C is not an operational target but an outcome that depends on limiting the quantity of emissions and the time within which this is done, both of which can be achieved through targeted actions and monitoring of the same. Current formulations suffer from the same weaknesses as previous ones.

Doors have been opened in the accord for the removal or at least blurring of distinctions between developed and developing countries. At US insistence, even voluntary mitigation actions by the latter will be subject to “international consultations and analysis,” a thinly veil over international monitoring and verification. The provision for funding is worded not as a binding commitment of developed countries but that they would seek to “mobilise” these amounts from various sources leaving open the possibility not only of uncertainty as to amounts but also of diversion of aid money, funding from World bank or IMF etc.

India also needs to think seriously about differences among G77 developing countries that came to the surface in Copenhagen. While India has rightly paid attention to cementing the BASIC alliance, and of course is falling over backwards to please the US in the interests of the “strategic alliance,” it needs to ensure that it cements its natural alliance with the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS), the African Union and the bloc of least developed countries (LDCs) together accounting for over 85 nations. There is a deep sense of disquiet among these countries that the “big four” developing nations are making common cause with the developed countries while sacrificing the interests of the most vulnerable. This is one red line India would do well not to cross.

Article appeared in EPW

The public has for long remained isolated from an unfolding scandal, simply because it concerns the gatekeeper who determines what it knows. Access to information is the principle that the media purportedly functions on. But the media could just as easily impose an information blockade when that is in its best interests.

That individual media practitioners have often been susceptible to material inducements to skew their coverage one way or the other has been widely known. But now it is official and institutionalised. News establishments sell space for coverage, much like they do for advertisements.

The “cash for coverage” abuse was noted during the extended campaign for the Lok Sabha elections between March and May this year. Further instances of cash payments being used to secure favourable media coverage for particular candidates and parties were recorded during the elections to three state legislative assemblies in October.

Individual journalists of some stature began speaking out against the abuse soon after the parliamentary elections were over. Their advocacy soon induced the Press Council of India to commence a formal inquiry into the abuse. Yet within the media itself, the wall of silence remained impregnable. That arrangement of convenience seemed to come asunder the day a major global conclave of the newspaper industry began in Hyderabad, last month when The Hindu frontpaged a report on the scandal.

The headline news here is that the chief minister of Maharashtra, for considerations that are yet unknown, managed to get identical stories about his achievements (both real and imagined, though mostly the latter) featured in a number of Marathi newspapers, under different bylines. Several newspapers also carried extensive supplements within their main editions, blazoning his glories, again without the slightest suggestion that this was advertising content. The obvious inference – that all this content was paid for – offers a telling comment on the new revenue model that the news industry has adopted to shore up its sagging commercial fortunes.

Few sectors of the economy have had the buoyant growth rates over the last two decades of the media. Few, indeed, have had the same luxury of functioning in an absolutely unregulated environment. Though deregulation has been the reigning ethos of the last two decades, the model assumes, first, a competitive marketplace where easily measured physical attributes provide a stable baseline against which price becomes a reliable parameter for consumer decisions. This may be okay for soaps and detergents, for telephone services, or for air travel. But it does not really ensure an outcome that is anywhere near optimal in the market for information, where various gradations of quality are involved.

News in both the print and electronic variants, moreover, is a commodity that is always sold at a price below its cost. But unfortunately, the news industry in India has evolved along a trajectory that makes it almost a worthless commodity.

What would a consumer say if she were to be told that in an effort to give her information cheap, the product she buys has been already sold several times over at a price beyond her imagination? How would she react if she were to be told that aside from its overt manifestations, the hidden persuader of advertising has acquired multiple covert dimensions? That she is merely the last and the least important in the value chain and of no real consequence, since the price she pays is derisory compared to that paid by those who determine media content?

The media industry in India today faces serious questions about its sustainability. Though devoid of immediate practical consequence or profit, some of the strategic choices the news industry made over the last two decades need now to be reviewed.It may be time to ask, for starters, if the industry did the right thing by itself and its customers from about the mid-1990s, by tying its commercial success to advertising rather than circulation.

That was a strategic shift that the country’s biggest media organisations were collectively responsible for. Once newsprint was decontrolled in 1995, the bigger newspaper groups began to enjoy immense leeway in determining their selling price, so that any price that was close enough to the resale value of a newspaper – as measured in the market for waste-paper – made good commercial sense.

Content became a side-issue in other words, since there was no value on it from the point of view of the publisher. From there to leveraging content itself as a direct revenue source was a short step.Thus, in March 2003, the country’s biggest media group announced what it called the “Medianet” initiative, professedly part of its effort to stay current with journalistic practices in rapidly changing times. Subtlety aside, the concept was simply to curb the corruption of the trade by individual journalists, by institutionalising it.

Two years later, the same media group introduced another innovation, called “private treaties”, involving the acquisition of shares in enterprises in exchange for advertising space. When the concerned enterprise grew to a level where it could conceivably go public, the media company that had freely advertised its merits would cash in. This example was one that most media enterprises, including the broadcast companies, have eagerly followed.

With declared advertising spending falling since the onset of the global financial crisis, the news industry is pressing ahead in accordance with the inherent logic of this scenario. Consumer choice is the obvious first victim. The next could well be the media industry itself.

The Copenhagen Climate Conference has ended without meeting its goal of a legally binding agreement for the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. Without a treaty committing the rich and industrialized countries to deep emission cuts, the lives and well-being of hundreds of millions of people, especially in the developing world, have been put at risk. This will most adversely affect people in South Asia, large parts of Africa, least developed countries and island nations that could be entirely submerged under rising sea-levels. People all over the world had been hoping that the Conference would chart out a clear course to save humanity and the planet from runaway global warming and climate change. This has not been happened. The political leaders who gathered in Copenhagen have failed their people by not delivering an effective and equitable climate change agreement.

Such an agreement in Copenhagen was made impossible by the positions and tactics of the US and other developed countries. From the first day to the last at Copenhagen, the US and its allies tried their utmost to kill the Kyoto Protocol itself, negate the cornerstone principle of differentiation between the industrialized and developing countries, and pressurize the developing countries to take on the major burden of reducing global emissions. Their inability to achieve these aims was due to the stiff and united resistance put up by the developing countries, a resistance which was one of the few positives in Copenhagen.

Major developing countries such as the BASIC bloc of China, India, Brazil and South Africa, as well as Mexico and Indonesia, voluntarily announced reductions in emissions growth rates in the interests of humanity, going far beyond their obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. However, the US, EU and other developed countries did not budge an inch from the low emission cuts they had declared before Copenhagen. A leaked draft UN Report has revealed that pledges made by large developing countries will contribute more to emission reductions than the low commitments of the US and other developed nations.

The CPI(M) had warned the Indian Government that unilateral concessions, before the negotiations, and without conditional linkages to deep cuts by developed countries, would not yield results. This is indeed what has happened.

A complete failure in Copenhagen has been averted with the face-saving text of a “Copenhagen Accord” with the promise of a legally binding agreement in 2010. The Accord was crafted in the closing hours of the Conference by the US, the BASIC countries and 22 other developed and developing countries from different continents and groupings. Though the Accord has no legal status and would not bind countries, it at least provides some way of keeping future negotiations going along the current twin tracks. Without this, the failure of the Conference could have meant The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marist) has issued the following statement On Copenhagen Climate Conference the collapse of the Climate Treaty and the Kyoto framework. However, this Accord is extremely weak in terms of the deep and immediate emission cuts by developed countries that are required to tackle climate change. It is deeply ambiguous with several loopholes and the possibility of different interpretations, particularly with regard to emission cuts by developing countries, and fund and technology transfers.India should therefore ensure that in future negotiations, the red lines committed by the government in Parliament are adhered to. India must also press for deep and immediate emission cuts by the US and other developed countries and work with other developing countries to ensure sustainable development and equitable terms in any final Treaty.

Capitalism robs people through its dynamic laws of creating surplus is a universal understanding. But through cheating and committing fraud, earning profits is also not averse to the capitalists.

One such incident came to light in an erstwhile small hamlet of Darlaghat in Solan district of Himachal Pradesh. Now this hamlet is buzz with unprecedented economic activity in the area as it produces cement under the brand name of Ambuja Cements Limited earlier known as Gujarat Ambuja Cements Limited (GACL). Interestingly since last 3 terms i.e 15 years period the panchayat is won by the communists. A peculiar kind of fraud was committed at the behest of the management of the company (ACL).

Changing the land value

The ACL that manufactures cement produced 15.12 lakh tonnes just in the month of Nov 2009 (http://www.gujaratambuja.com/result_november_09.htm). In Himachal it does it in two parts i.e., partially manufactures in Darlaghat in Solan district and partially in Ropar in Punjab district where it carries the lime stone and converts it into cement. Since the mining work to extract cement requires large tracts of land hence land from adjoining village needs to be acquired. The entire belt of Darlaghat is rich in Lime stone deposits because of which two cement companies ACL& Jaypee are established in the same tehsil. This land acquisition has become the biggest manipulative game plan in which the management bribes the district administration and the state government and undervalues the land that is to be acquired. The poor peasants have nothing much to bargain except fighting for the enhancement of the award once proceedings under section 4 of land acquisition act created during the British Raj. To scrap this section there is a strong movement in the country whereby the peasant has not right except to part away with his land. But here in the present case a different methodology was adopted.

The ACL had employed private revenue Patwari who prior to assessment of land measuring 246.16 bighas of Gyana village where nearly 300 families with a population of over 1200 were to be affected. This patwari’ was planted in government services as revenue patwari in 1998 and was posted in a nearby patwar/ revenue circle. But from there within a period of 6 months he was transferred to Gyana where the land was to be acquired. The said patwari tampered the records and changed the value of the land by tampering the revenue / Maal from 0 and 3 paise to 8 and 8 paise for agricultural and non agricultural land respectively. Just changed 0 and 3 to 8.(actually lower the paise of Maal/ revenue higher the value of land). This tampering changed the value of land from what a bigha (12 bighas is equal to 1 hectare) would cost from Rs 7 lac to just Rs 37500 for agricultural land and from Rs 80,000 to a meager Rs 7,125/- for non agricultural land. This award was made on 21st February 2009. Incidentally the said patwari after doing all this once again resigned from the government services and has been posted as Assistant Manager Land Department in Ambuja Cements Limited. This planned exercise meant robbing the people of the area of more than Rs 20 crore which was meticulously planned by the ACL.

When an enquiry was conducted into the whole episode of tampering the executive magistrate Arki found that large scale tampering has been done without indicting anyone in the entire exercise. In his report dated 21st February 2009 he has categorically mentioned that the land has been undervalued and foul play has been done which has affected the peasants. Even an FIR in this regard has been registered but without putting the onus on anybody. Despite this revelation neither the state government nor the company management has come forward to change the award and increase the amount to be paid to the poor peasants.

Some other interesting features:
· In a cubic meter of land limestone worth Rs 27000 is extracted.
· In a bigha of land the total cement manufactured after adding fly ash etc fetches an amount of Rs 5 crores and 40 lakhs.
· The value for land is different for agricultural and non agricultural quality whereas the limestone extracted is just the same and fetches an equal revenue for the company.
· There are instances where the people have not been paid a penny since 1991 but their land stands acquired and the mining work is being carried out.
· Though the state government has declared a policy of providing employment to the local youth but as of now just 3 families have been provided employment from Chola, Rouri and Sangoi panchayats that will face the largest brunt of displacement where more than 896.14 bighas land is to be acquired displacing more than 300 families.
· Already the state has paid a heavy price for the so called national development. In large reservoirs like Bhakra and Pong Dam thousands of families were displaced and their rehabilitation still remains an issue to be settled. Further in Himachal 66.6% is forest land and only 6 lakh hectares is available for agricultural purposes. Of this nearly 1 lakh hectare has been acquired or taken over for the construction of dams, hydel projects, cement plants, private universities (16 private universities are being opened up in HImachal) and such other industrial projects. Hence this issue of rehabilitation, compensation and employment is very important one.

Since last 120 days the local unit of the Himachal Kisan Sabha an affiliate of the All India Kisan Sabha is on a chain hunger strike demanding a vigilance enquiry into the scam and for increasing the award of land.