What Monsoon Means

from www.downtoearth.org.in, the online edition of Down To Earth magazine, a leading science & environment fortnightly published by Society for Environmental Communications (Centre for Science & Environment, CSE India)

There is one being-Indian-thing, which spans the urban-rural and the rich-poor divide: our annual watch and wait for the monsoon. It begins every year, without fail as heat climbs and the monsoon advances. The farmers wait desperately because they need the rain at the right time to sow their crops. The city managers wait because by the beginning of each monsoon period, the reservoirs that supply water to cities are precariously low. All of us wait, in spite of our air-conditioned living, for the relief rain brings to the scorching heat and dust. This is perhaps the only time when the entire country is one in desperation. It cannot exhale till it rains.

But even as I write this several questions come to my mind. How much do we really know about this phenomenon so important in every Indi an’s life? Do we know why it rains? Do we know that scientists are still squabbling about the definition of monsoon? The only one they have is seasonal winds, which have regular directions, and they get flummoxed when this changes. Do we know our monsoon is a truly globalised phenomenon. It is integrated and linked to the ocean current in the faraway Pacific, the temperature of the Tibetan plat eau, the Eurasian snow and even the freshwater content in the Bay of Bengal. Do we even know who the monsoon scientists are in India and how they are desperately learning to chase this unpredictable and variable event better? We don’t. We have been taught some of the science in school, but never in real life. It is not part of the usable knowledge, what we think we need to know to survive our world of today. But we are wrong.

The grand old man of the Indian monsoon, the late P R Pisharoty, would have told you that this annual event brings us rain in just about 100 hours in the 8,765-hour year, which means it is our challenge to manage it well. Environmentalist Anil Agarwal would have explained the monsoon shows how nature uses weak forces rather than concentrated forces to do its work. Just think: it takes a very small temperature difference to carry as much as 40,000 billion tonnes of water from the oceans across thousands of miles to dump it as rainfall over India. This lack of knowledge of nature’s ways is at the core of the environmental crisis, he would say.

Consider again: we use concentrated energy sources such as coal and oil that have created enormous problems like local air pollution and global climate chan ge. If we understood the ways of nature, we would shift to weaker sources of energy like solar or move to using rainfall, not wait till it is concentrated in rivers and aquifers. “Humans have come to rely much more on concentrated water sources like rivers and aquifers in the past 100 years. But heavy use of these sources is leading to their overexploitation. In the 21st century, human beings will once again move to weaker water resource like rainfall,” said Agarwal. In other words, the more we understand the monsoon, the more we will learn how to move from unravelling nature to imitating it for sustainable development.

Another question I have is: how much do we know how to live without the monsoons? I am sure you have heard it said that very soon we will be ‘developed’, and that would mean we would no longer be ‘dependent’ on this crazy national obsession called the monsoon. Let’s be clear this is not going to happen in a hurry. After 60-odd years of Independence and after considerable investment in surface irrigation systems, the bulk of Indian agriculture remains rainfed. This means farmers are at the mercy of this capricious and undependable God. But this is not even the full picture. What is not said is that between 60 and 80 per cent of the irrigated area is watered by groun dwater, a resou rce, which needs the rain to recha rge its supply. This is why every year as the monsoon progresses from Kerala to Kashmir or from Bengal to Rajas than, hearts stop beating if it halts, slows or dies. The words low pressure and depressions are part of the Indian lexicon. The monsoon is and will remain India’s true finance minister.

Therefore, I believe, instead of wanting to reduce dependence we should celebrate and deepen our engagement with the monsoon. Our monsoon lexicon must expand so that we harvest the rain—every drop of it where and when it falls. This must be the national obsession, treasuring the value of each raindrop. We must build a water future based on decentralised systems—check dams, lakes, ponds, wells, grasses and trees, everything that can slow the journey of rain to the oceans.

If we can do this, we can answer my last and most painful question. How should we live and celebrate the rain that falls in our cities and fields? Today, we cry when it does not rain and weep when it does because rain brings floods and disease in fields and traffic jams in cities. Just think of the devastating cycle of water stress and floods we witness each year without fail and with increasing ferocity. The only way to change is relearn the art of living with water that falls every year.

The monsoon is part of each of us. Now we have to make it real.


—Sunita Narain

What Monsoon Means

from www.downtoearth.org.in, the online edition of Down To Earth magazine, a leading science & environment fortnightly published by Society for Environmental Communications (Centre for Science & Environment, CSE India)

There is one being-Indian-thing, which spans the urban-rural and the rich-poor divide: our annual watch and wait for the monsoon. It begins every year, without fail as heat climbs and the monsoon advances. The farmers wait desperately because they need the rain at the right time to sow their crops. The city managers wait because by the beginning of each monsoon period, the reservoirs that supply water to cities are precariously low. All of us wait, in spite of our air-conditioned living, for the relief rain brings to the scorching heat and dust. This is perhaps the only time when the entire country is one in desperation. It cannot exhale till it rains.

But even as I write this several questions come to my mind. How much do we really know about this phenomenon so important in every Indi an’s life? Do we know why it rains? Do we know that scientists are still squabbling about the definition of monsoon? The only one they have is seasonal winds, which have regular directions, and they get flummoxed when this changes. Do we know our monsoon is a truly globalised phenomenon. It is integrated and linked to the ocean current in the faraway Pacific, the temperature of the Tibetan plat eau, the Eurasian snow and even the freshwater content in the Bay of Bengal. Do we even know who the monsoon scientists are in India and how they are desperately learning to chase this unpredictable and variable event better? We don’t. We have been taught some of the science in school, but never in real life. It is not part of the usable knowledge, what we think we need to know to survive our world of today. But we are wrong.

The grand old man of the Indian monsoon, the late P R Pisharoty, would have told you that this annual event brings us rain in just about 100 hours in the 8,765-hour year, which means it is our challenge to manage it well. Environmentalist Anil Agarwal would have explained the monsoon shows how nature uses weak forces rather than concentrated forces to do its work. Just think: it takes a very small temperature difference to carry as much as 40,000 billion tonnes of water from the oceans across thousands of miles to dump it as rainfall over India. This lack of knowledge of nature’s ways is at the core of the environmental crisis, he would say.

Consider again: we use concentrated energy sources such as coal and oil that have created enormous problems like local air pollution and global climate chan ge. If we understood the ways of nature, we would shift to weaker sources of energy like solar or move to using rainfall, not wait till it is concentrated in rivers and aquifers. “Humans have come to rely much more on concentrated water sources like rivers and aquifers in the past 100 years. But heavy use of these sources is leading to their overexploitation. In the 21st century, human beings will once again move to weaker water resource like rainfall,” said Agarwal. In other words, the more we understand the monsoon, the more we will learn how to move from unravelling nature to imitating it for sustainable development.

Another question I have is: how much do we know how to live without the monsoons? I am sure you have heard it said that very soon we will be ‘developed’, and that would mean we would no longer be ‘dependent’ on this crazy national obsession called the monsoon. Let’s be clear this is not going to happen in a hurry. After 60-odd years of Independence and after considerable investment in surface irrigation systems, the bulk of Indian agriculture remains rainfed. This means farmers are at the mercy of this capricious and undependable God. But this is not even the full picture. What is not said is that between 60 and 80 per cent of the irrigated area is watered by groun dwater, a resou rce, which needs the rain to recha rge its supply. This is why every year as the monsoon progresses from Kerala to Kashmir or from Bengal to Rajas than, hearts stop beating if it halts, slows or dies. The words low pressure and depressions are part of the Indian lexicon. The monsoon is and will remain India’s true finance minister.

Therefore, I believe, instead of wanting to reduce dependence we should celebrate and deepen our engagement with the monsoon. Our monsoon lexicon must expand so that we harvest the rain—every drop of it where and when it falls. This must be the national obsession, treasuring the value of each raindrop. We must build a water future based on decentralised systems—check dams, lakes, ponds, wells, grasses and trees, everything that can slow the journey of rain to the oceans.

If we can do this, we can answer my last and most painful question. How should we live and celebrate the rain that falls in our cities and fields? Today, we cry when it does not rain and weep when it does because rain brings floods and disease in fields and traffic jams in cities. Just think of the devastating cycle of water stress and floods we witness each year without fail and with increasing ferocity. The only way to change is relearn the art of living with water that falls every year.

The monsoon is part of each of us. Now we have to make it real.


—Sunita Narain

The Bhopal Legacy: Reworking Corporate Liability

from www.downtoearth.org.in, the online edition of Down To Earth magazine, a leading science & environment fortnightly published by Society for Environmental Communications (Centre for Science & Environment, CSE India)





Days after President Barack Obama lashed out at British Petroleum (BP) saying he would not let them ‘nickel and dime’ his people in the oil spill case, a sessions court in Bhopal did precisely that with the victims of the world’s worst industrial disaster.

After 25 long years the court of the chief judicial magistrate pronounced its verdict on the criminal case against Union Carbide and its Indian subsidiary on the matter of negligence and liability. The court’s decision holds seven officials of Union Carbide India guilty, but on diluted charges of accidental injury—tantamount to a traffic accident—and lets off the main accused of the US parent company.

Universally called a travesty of justice, the verdict has, however, been welcomed by the US government. It believes the verdict now puts to rest all cases against its ‘unfortunate’ victim company, Union Carbide.

There is no doubt this is one case where the victims have been let down completely by the Indian State—government and judiciary. It is no small matter the Union law minister admitted as much, saying sadly “justice has been buried in the Bhopal case”. It is well accepted the Supreme Court erred badly first in 1989, by settling all civil and criminal liability at a piddly sum of US $470 million (in 1991 it reopened the criminal case).

Then in 1996, the apex court reduced criminal charges from section 304b—culpable homicide with a maximum punishment of 10 years—to a milder section 304a, used in traffic accidents for deaths caused by rash or negligent acts, which limits the term of imprisonment and provides for lighter fines.

In all this, the court has been strangely silent about the management of relief and the lack of medical research and treatment for the victims.

The apex court, known to side with environmental victims, has also been vacillating on the matter of what should be done with the abandoned factory site, which is full of toxic contaminants the company left behind. The trial court has only compounded and sealed these errors—with a judgment that is hurting victims even more (if possible) than the deadly and horrific night when the city died a million deaths.

Bhopal is about shame. Bhopal is also about what the country, indeed all countries, must do about corporate liability for the unknown. In 1984, when the pesticide factory’s poison gas hit Bhopal, to kill and maim thousands, nobody had seen or imagined a disaster of this kind. The question of liability was hushed up, largely because it involved a US company. Nobody wanted to mess around with this corporate powerhouse, even in those times of relative innocence.

The amount settled for the disaster, still unfolding because lives continue to be lost and ailments do not go away, was less than what was agreed in the Exxon Valdex case that occurred a few years later in 1989. In this oil disaster, which hit the coast of Alaska in the US, the toll on the natural environment— the flora and fauna—was priced double (some US$ 1 billion settled for punitive and economic damages) that paid for the thousands of human lives lost and maimed in Bhopal.

But oil interests in the US are not small fry. In 1990, post-Exxon Valdez, the Oil Pollution Act was passed. The act capped the liability of economic damages from such an oil disaster at a mere US $75 million. Today, even as the US is learning how it never anticipated a disaster such as the BP spill—a leak in an oil well so deep in the ocean that human intervention is not possible—this cap has become a point of friction in the country.

Today, the US Senate wants the cap removed. Otherwise it will have to prove that BP’s oil spill was the result of deliberate and gross negligence and/or regulatory non-compliance. The US Senate knows this will be difficult to establish, given the country’s legal process. The country’s president also says it is not regulatory noncompliance, just that regulations have been played around with and diluted because of the ‘cosy relationship between big oil and government’.

This is the right time to ask the Indian government to rethink the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damages Bill it wants to present in Parliament. The bill caps the operator’s liability at Rs 500 crore per incident, with additional damages of approximately Rs 2,300 crore to be made good by the government. This amount is even less than what was paid in the case of Bhopal, a ridiculously low amount; this amount is a joke when it comes to a nuclear accident.

US companies with an interest in the nuclear business desperately want India to pass this bill. It will cap liability and hence reduce their insurance cover and costs. It is, thus, not a surprise that the official US response to the trial court judgment on Bhopal mentions this bill and wants the Indian government not to link the two.

But there is a link. The issue of liability must be established and it must be based on full costs. Only then can we believe the corporations that want to sell us these future and unknown high-risk technologies. After the shame of Bhopal, nothing less is acceptable.

—Sunita Narain