Ben’s Blog

Byron Smith is writing a 3 part blog series on Ecology and the Gospel. Reviewing the catalogue of contemporary environmental horrors – Climate change. Biodiversity loss and habitat destruction. Resource depletion. Desertification. Overfishing. Ocean acidification… – he asks:

Is concern about such matters a distraction from the gospel or even a dangerous false agenda proposed by pantheist environmentalists?

The whole thing is worth reading, but I particularly liked Byron’s way of articulating part of every generation’s “greatest moral question” as,

whether we will love our neighbour as ourselves, or love ourselves to the harm of our neighbour.

I think that pretty much sums up for me the profound connection between our ecological and inter-personal ethics. Greenhouse gas emissions from our carbon-intensive economies and lifestyles are crowding the shared sky of our global village and warming the Earth, doing measurable harm to our poorest global neighbours.

A few years ago I fronted a DVD – Climate of Change – produced by TEAR Australia, looking at the impacts of climate change on Bangladesh, and also at the extraordinary community development work of HEED Bangladesh that is helping build community capacity and resilience in the face of climate change. And right now in my work with United Mission to Nepal, we are seeing the impacts of climate change in Nepal and working with poor communities to help them adapt.

Indifference, ignorance, and indulgence should not be options for Christians, but – sadly – they seem to be the default options for most of us most of the time. Our lifestyles, our worship, and our political discourse bear very little evidence that we take creation, new creation, and an other-centred ecological ethic seriously.

Or do you have, and are you part of, a story of change and hope?

I’m just back from my second trip to Rukum, in Nepal’s mid-Western hills. (My post on the first visit, “Dancing with Magars”, is here.)

My schedule said:

• advocacy training with partner NGOs; and
• time with staff discussing ways to help empower communities and build more accountable and responsive local governance.

But Rukum likes to put me in interesting situations. This time I was invited off the street to observe, “just for a minute”, a cross-party program launching a campaign against caste-based discrimination and untouchability.

Though explicitly prohibited by law and Nepal’s Interim Constitution, the group of people known as dalits (which means “the oppressed”) still face the stigma and exclusion of untouchability on the basis of their status in the Hindu caste system. (Or at least in the prevailing interpretation of the Hindu caste system.) For some it means that they will never be invited into the home of a higher-caste person, or that no higher-caste person will accept a drink from their hand. It can mean exclusion from and under-representation in schooling, administrative positions and the like. It can mean being locked into a traditional caste-based occupation such as tool-making, tailoring, and so on, with few opportunities to develop new skills and techniques to compete against cheap imports. It can mean being bound in a form of peonage, serving one or more families in exchange for food and small items, rather than wages, in an arrangement that can last generations.

So, bad on pretty much every level. Socially, economically, psycho-socially, politically… just bad.

I was interested to observe the event and my Nepali is up to following a large part of what people say as long as there’s not too much unfamiliar vocab and the speaker doesn’t talk too fast. (Though, on reflection, these conditions were unlikely to have been met at a political event.) However, my chances of remaining an observer started diminishing rapidly when the event organiser came over to ask my name, organisation, and country of origin… Then another chair was placed up on the stage among the invited guests and speakers… Then I was asked (in Nepali) if I would say a few words about the issue and about conditions in my country…

Polite refusals having accomplished precisely nothing I sat on stage ransacking my Nepali vocab and grammar to see what I could say about caste-based discrimination. And managed to give a 3 or 4 minute speech that went something like:

I’m sorry to tell you that there is discrimination in my country, Australia. Sometimes the rich look down on the poor. Sometimes white people discriminate against people with dark skin. Sometimes there is even violence. So there is discrimination. But there is no untouchability. Anyone can take water from the hand of another. Anyone can enter the home of another if invited.*

Caste-based discrimination needs to end in Nepal. If people’s rights are not respected, if caste-based discrimination still exists, then Nepal will not develop.

So, seeing this campaign, I am very happy and supportive. I wish you success in your actions against untouchability. I hope that together you can change society.

*These two lines about receiving water and being welcome in another’s home were greeted with applause. And, Australia, you came off pretty well in the speech, mostly because I don’t know the words for racism, xenophobia and mistreatment of asylum-seekers.

This is an update to a previous post about access to water in Dhading District.

Short summary of the previous post:

1) 35 years ago a Kumal community built an irrigation channel. (Kumals are one of Nepal’s ethnic minorities and generally experience worse health, education and economic outcomes than Nepal’s average – and being at the average in Nepal is no great place to be).

2) Five years later a high-caste community built an irrigation channel in a way that diverted all the water away from the Kumal’s channel. This was not legal at the time, but there you go.

3) In the last 2 years the Kumals and a local NGO network have tried many things to get fair and secure access to water for irrigation:

• They engaged in countless meetings and dialogues to bring about reconciliation and a fair agreement between the two communities. Of course, the community with all the water was happy to talk endlessly with the community with none of the water. So these meetings didn’t achieve very much.
• They established a users committee to organise the community. This committee was highjacked by the high-caste community who managed to get one of their own members elected to the Kumal’s own committee.
• They spoke with the media about the situation. But after the brief discomfort brought about by the public attention had faded, the high-caste community went right back to ignoring the water sharing agreement they had come to.

Since then, though, the Kumals have continued to organise and take action. They took their case to the District’s Chief Development Officer and called on him to take action. In response to their lobbying, the CDO sent a team of engineers from the water ministry to visit the site and survey the two channels. Both communities were also asked to give an account of the amount of land in each place.

The Kumals hope that this information will be used to determine a fair allocation of water to each community and guide the engineers when they come to rebuild the two channels. Let’s hope that’s how it works. There are several ways that the Kumals could still be denied justice. The land tallies might be inaccurate or misrepresented. The work on the channels might be delayed. Or it might be done without proper regard to the communities’ needs.

But by continuing to speak up the Kumals are paving the way for change. Not only a change in the irrigation infrastructure available in the village. Nor only the nutrition and health benefits that will come when the water is available. Also a change in the Kumals’ own self-understanding and perception of their place in the world.

The end of the year (and decade) abounds in lists. My list of lists includes:

59 alternative ways to celebrate a buy-nothing-Christmas.

Best hundred books of the decade.

Worst List Ever.

I’ll be writing my own soon for sure.

And if you’re after inspiration and challenge this list of top 10 individual protests is a must-read. Some, like Gandhi and Rosa Parks, you’ll know of and some – like Zackie Achmat and Vedran Smailovic – you may not know of. I hadn’t heard of every protest on the list, and was glad to be enlightened.

The outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit is, as I’ve noted here, deeply disappointing. So, how do we take that disappointment and channel it towards creative, positive change?

I’m thinking that we need to give our leaders and representatives the hardest year they’ve ever had in 2010. We need to be informed and get smart. They need to hear from us every day about playing their part in creating a fair, ambitious and binding deal in Mexico City in 2010. They shouldn’t be able to answer their mail or attend a community meeting without being asked what they personally are doing to build a global agreement. Leaders themselves set the due date for a deal to preserve a safe climate as December 2009. In Copenhagen, they granted themselves a one year’s extension on that assignment and they need to know they don’t have our permission to put it off again. The atmosphere is not much inclined towards granting extensions either. We need action now.

We need to change our personal and local environments too. If we aren’t acting ourselves to reduce our emissions, to live more simply, and to speak out in solidarity with the poor and vulnerable then our representatives are right to take that as a pretty strong signal that we don’t really care. We need to find the next step and take it. And then take the next one. Ditch the car for the bike or the bus. Sign up for green power. Plant a garden. Pray, preach and convert our churches. Speak out at our local council meetings. Attend rallies and climate camps. Get arrested for chaining ourselves to trainloads of coal.

If we lead, leaders follow.

So, it’s over, according to Bill Easterly, writing at his aidwatch blog. The Millennium Development Goals (still 6 years away from their 2015 target date) will not and can not be achieved. The source for his prophecy? The 2009 Millennium Development Goal progress report, which is available here (5mb pdf).

Sure enough, the report makes sobering reading for campaigners who have been calling on governments to “spare no effort” to achieve these 8 anti-poverty goals – as they promised to do. Very few of the goals are on track to be achieved at the global level, though there is progress on several – for example, increasing primary education (88% children of children worldwide enrolled in 2007, up from 83% in 2000), reducing child mortality, and halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water (which the world is on track to achieve).

Dishearteningly, the global financial crisis and food price rises already are reversing, or threaten to reverse, progress against the targets of Goal 1, to reduce extreme poverty and hunger.

Now Easterly makes some good points about accountability and the need for a clearly defined theory and strategy for change in policy advocacy and campaigning. All of this needs to be taken seriously. Refreshingly, he also makes his critique in a way that isn’t entirely negative. For example, he writes some nice things (albeit, in “silver lining” mode) about the global plan, and advocacy campaign, for large-scale poverty reduction…

The inspirational enthusiasm and increased efforts surrounding the MDGs probably did contribute to progress on specific efforts and some partial success stories (mainly in health and education), as pointed out in the UN MDG 2009 report. That can give some hope for the future and some solace to the hard-working and deeply committed participants.

But overall, his contention is that we should give up on the MDGs and focus on something else that may bring some good – he describes the (sure, still 6 years away but, to his mind, inevitable) failure of the MDGs as a “tragedy” for all who contributed to campaigns for the achievement, and a greater tragedy for the world’s poor.

I take issue with his analysis. First, there’s the principle of giving up on a project half-way through (doing a Palin?) because it appears likely that not all of the goals will be achieved in full. Clearly, on current progress, many of the goals won’t be achieved in full, though I don’t see that Easterly really makes a strong case that they can’t be. For example, his assertion that “the MDGs’ attainment depended all along on global and national economic growth” (and supporting assertion that this is beyond any government’s control) seems pretty bald. All of the goals were dependent entirely on global and national economic growth? In every region?

Second, his call for focused and strategic advocacy that identifies who is responsible for an injustice, why it is a problem that needs to be addressed, and what they should do about it, is a good one, but I don’t actually see it as a criticism of the Millennium Development Goals themselves. I certainly don’t see it as a criticism of the civil society campaigns that have developed around them.

Campaigns like Make Poverty History in Australia, and scores of other national campaigns around the world, have taken the shared vision and inspiration of the MDGs, they’ve used analysis and information from MDG efforts and they’ve heaved mightly on the strategic lever of a widely-publicised international commitment to seriously tackle global poverty. That is to say, MDG campaigners haven’t, as far as I can tell, remained vague and unfocused about who can deliver change, why they should and what they should do to deliver the change. In each national context, they’ve developed focused advocacy campaigns and asked their governments to act on things that were in their power. They broke the goals down, they got specific, they adapted their policy asks to their national contexts, and they applied pressure to get what they were asking for. These campaigns have, I would say, genuinely influenced discussion and action for pro-poor development at the international level and at the national level – in countries both rich and poor.

Third, there are more positives from the campaign than Easterly makes space to credit in his post. One story that he doesn’t mention is the unprecedented commitment (and investment) to increase aid among the world’s donor nations. Where aid flows from OECD countries had declined in the 1990s, last year they reached their highest ever level of USD 119.8 billion.

And as for debt, sure, there is still plenty of unfinished business to deal with the debt burden of the world’s poorest countries, but by the end of 2008, 35 countries had received USD 102.6 billion (400 kb pdf) of debt relief, and poverty-reducing expenditure was increasing among these countries as a group. I think it’s likely that these  commitments, along with the new levels of public interest in and support for aid and debt cancellation, have been driven to a very large extent by campaigning around the Millennium Development Goals.

Finally, some of his reasonable points about accountability and the likelihood of being able to hold all governments accountable for the achievement (or not) of the MDGs, seem to build on the assumption that it is better for nations to wear their indifference to poverty on their sleeve rather than hypocritically hide it behind an international agreement they have no intention of honouring. It’s a fair point in a way, I guess…

But… what if 189 countries did sign up to an agreement to “spare no effort” to free a billion men, women and children from abject and dehumanising poverty… What if millions of people from across the world joined together in a global campaign to demand that those countries keep their promises…

OK, so the aid budget has increased since last year’s budget (by 5.6% in real terms). And  it seems like there are quite a handful of small things, as well as a few medium-sized ones, to be happy with in this moderately expanded budget.

First off, the budget statement is framed with a very welcome recognition of the way in which the global economic downturn will affect poorer countries (who have largely been ignored in media coverage about the issue – I mean they’re always poor, right? A global recession can’t make any difference to them…)

The global recession will generate enormous difficulties for developing country governments. While needing to help newly vulnerable populations, they will have less tax and other revenue to fund crisis responses and to maintain basic services such as health and education. This place a special responsibility on donor government to support developing country counterparts to generate employment and help limit the scale of the human impacts.

To this end, there are very welcome increases in investment in basic services, such as:

• basic education (increased roughly 46% on last year)
• water and sanitation (up 278% on last year)
• rural development (up 77% on last year)
• health (increased around 38% on last year)

The increase for maternal and child health (according to the estimates of the inestimable Garth Luke, now a senior researcher at World Vision) is very substantial, and will rise to $370 million from last year’s budgeted $260 million. Campaigners active in the MakePovertyHistory and Micah Challenge campaigns should be pleased, because maternal and child health in our region was one of the key issues they focused on.

There’s also some new $$ for economic infrastructure development – particularly rural electrification, roads and labour-intensive public works to help tackle unemployment. After long periods of neglect by all donors, not just Australia, rural development and agriculture is also starting to get renewed attention, particularly in light of the crisis in staple food prices of the last two years. For its part Australia puts up around $230 million for rural development (up 77% from around $170 million last year) focusing on agricultural productivity, the strengthening of markets, and support for poor farmers and communities.

A quick sample of the sectoral breakdown of aid budgets over the last decade shows a hopeful trend, I think.

As you can see, from around 2002/03 Australian aid (under Howard and Downer) went on a bit of a governance binge. Law and order programs, placement of Australians in senior positions in Pacific Island bureaucracies, capacity building of government institutions, were the flavour of the day (actually, of most of the decade). These programs have their place, but in 2005/06 these programs accounted for more than one-third of Australian aid. More Australian aid money was being spent on governance programs than on health and education combined. So it’s good to see that health and education now seem to be getting some sustained attention.

However, greater investments are going to be needed if Australia is to make a substantial contribution to stemming the wave of poverty and hunger that is likely to hit the poor over the next few years. The budget statement itself acknowledges that, according to a World Bank study, up to 90 million extra people worldwide (including 62 million people in our neighbourhood) will live in extreme income poverty this year because of the global recession.

A small aside on the right to food, and the livelihoods of poor, small-scale farmers – it’s worth checking out this statement made to the UN General Assembly by Olivier de Schutter, the Special Rapportuer on the Right to Food.

He notes that,

Since hunger is not the result of too little food being produced, but rather of marginalization and disempowerment of the poorest, who lack the purchasing power they need to procure the food that is available, guaranteeing such a protection should be a top priority.

He argues that prioritising the hungry and those vulnerable to food shortages should be the highest priority for policy makers. The priorities he outlines in this short speech are well worth keeping in mind as Australia’s aid program begins to scale up (though maybe slowly) its investment in rural development and agriculture.

The last observation I have is another small encouragement. When Rudd first announced his policy of lifting aid to 0.5% GNI by 2015 in a speech to the Lowy Institute he was very careful, as I noted at the time, to rule out budget support as a way of delivering aid through Pacific Partnerships, preferring instead Australian-directed and delivered projects. However, this budget statement seems to point in the opposite direction:

Working in partnerships means that increasingly Australia will work through, rather than alongside, different countries’ own systems of government and service delivery.

This is a good thing.

The last thing we need is the Australian Government behaving like an NGO, setting up and running an ever-increasing multitude of projects*. Working through countries’ own health, education and general budget processes and systems is much more efficient than a Government trying to micro-manage too many projects, it ensures better coordination of donor and recipient country development goals, and can lead to greater effectiveness and development of recipient country’s own systems. See here for an exploration of this kind of budget support.

*I’m not saying that Governments can’t run projects, and I’m certainly not saying that NGOs shouldn’t. Just that they have different capacities, functions and niches and they should make the most of those.

I’ve just finished reading From Poverty to Power*, Duncan Green’s recent book, whose tagline gives you the book’s big idea:

How active citizens and effective states can change the world

Expounding the theme he regularly returns to, he says, “states that can guarantee security and the rule of law, and can design and implement an effective strategy to ensure inclusive economic growth” are essential for driving and managing the development process and “people working together to determine the course of their own lives, fighting for rights and justice in their own societies, are critical in holding states, private companies and others to account.”

It’s a chunky book, aiming at a pretty comprehensive look at different dimensions of power and their interactions at different levels to either advance or inhibit the capacities and opportunities of the poor. It is full of argument and insight (as well as stories of outrage and hope), and is well worth a read.

What’s great about the book is that it takes power (and powerlessness) seriously in all its dimensions (personal, inter-personal, social, political, financial) as it relates to human development and the protection and promotion of human rights. It argues that the redistribution of economic, social and political power, or the creation of new centres and forms of power among the poor, are vital for overcoming inequality, tackling poverty, defending human rights, and calling for –and supporting – responsive, accountable and effective governance.

Looking at national and international policy issues, and following the work of economists like Ha-Joon Chang and Dani Rodrik (and incorporating environmental and gender concerns), the book argues that “economic growth is everything” approaches are not sufficient to tackle poverty and inequality, and that countries (particularly poorer, developing ones) need to retain “policy space” and flexibility when dealing with the trans-national corporations of developed countries, or the architecture of global trade and finance (such as the World Trade Organisation, International Monetary Fund and World Bank). The work isn’t geared to bashing these institutions, and it certainly isn’t anti-market or anti-business. On many occasions it acknowledges the vital role that small and medium, and even large, enterprises can play in creating wealth, generating employment and opportunity, contributing to gender empowerment, and driving economic growth and development. But it takes the rights and flourishing of the poorest as the benchmark for assessing policy, or the behaviour of an institution, or set of governance arrangements – a stance that leads to sharp critique of corporations, international financial institutions, and governments at times.

Along the way, there is plenty of material to fuel your ire, or fire some arguments – for example the discussion of the behaviour of pharmaceutical companies in relation to Africa’s AIDS crisis, the slow-burning tragedy of the crippling debt burden still borne by the world’s poorest people, or the “rigged rules and double standards” of WTO agreements. There are plenty of “killer facts” as well sprinkled throughout to bring out the sharp edge of the topic under discussion.

I really only have one complaint , which is that the book’s strength seems also to be its weakness. Examining so many different forms of power and tools of empowerment (education, citizenship, land and property rights, social protection, cash transfers,…), so many forms of risk and vulnerability faced by the poor (finance, health, food security, conflict and violence, climate change…) and examining stories at so many different levels (the personal, local, national and international) means that, inevitably, many of the sections are really only introductions to the topic at hand, with not quite enough detail to do justice to the issue (though the treatment of issues like the international trade and finance systems, or community organising for political change are very good introductions). Nor do they properly back up the few prescriptive passages in the book. For example, it’s not clear to me what would actually be done differently if we heeded Green’s call for a “new economics for the 21st Century”. He’s probably right about the ascendency of a certain, very blunt, form of neo-classical economics in political decision making. But when he says,

Decision-makers will always need to consult, identify trade-offs, and agree priorities: such discussions are the stuff of politics, which in the end should be served, and not ruled, by economics

I really can’t imagine that decision-makers currently do otherwise.

Related to this is that the kaleidoscopic view of power explored here ends up reading, at certain points, like a change of topic every 20 pages or so, which gets a bit tiring when read at one sitting (or, in a 6-hour stretch in an overcrowded minivan winding its way through the hills of Far Western Nepal!). It would probably have been better to dip in and out of several of the sections according to interest and my ability to concentrate.

Oh, and a minor gripe is that Oxfam’s marketing team seem to have been allowed pretty free play in the text. I have no issue at all with sentences like, “Oxfam has learned that…” or “In the experience of Oxfam’s partners…” The book, after all, was written by Oxfam GB’s head of research and these lessons confirmed by personal and organisational experience provide much of the book’s strength and authenticity.

What started to irk me a little though was that whenever the words “International Non-Governmental Organisations…” cropped up, they were almost invariably followed by the words “… like Oxfam.” Now I know Oxfam is an example of one kind of INGO, and it’s probably worth pointing out once or twice on the way through, but surely not every time. First, it gets tedious and, second, you’d have a slightly warped view of INGOs if every time you thought about them you had to think of Oxfam (whose work, and staff, I really do like and admire).

Funnily enough, though, the words “like Oxfam” didn’t make it into the sentence that reads:

While activists from many developing countries appreciate the support that their organisations receive from INGOs, they often complain that INGOs are domineering…

But that’s definitely enough snark. You can see video of Duncan Green discussing the book here.

* From Poverty to Power is also the name of his excellent blog

Last week I travelled to Silghadi, the district capital of Doti District in Far Western Nepal. Silghadi itself is a very pretty, mainly Newari town, that snakes its way up a steep hill along two, eventually intersecting, lanes. It wasn’t the best time for seeing the town, or the amazing valley views though, because the air was thick with smoke from dozens of fires burning in nearby forests. For the first four days of our visit, we couldn’t see the valley floor and our eyes and throats stung.

The smoke did clear a little after that. And it was washed away in rain on our last night there.

Raju, my colleague in UMN’s advocacy team (well, we are the team in fact), and I had gone there to work with the UMN staff and some of UMN’s local NGO partners to provide advocacy training, and support for them as they identified issues they wanted to take action on. They were a diverse group, including school teachers, farmers, and disability advocates. But all volunteers, committed to making an impact in the lives of poor and marginalised communities in Doti.

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The issues they are taking up were also pretty various. One group wanted to advocate for building of an irrigation channel in their community. Another group were taking up the cause of children affected by conflict who need support in order to attend school. One had already launched an advocacy and outreach program to provide identity cards and access to subsidised government services for people with disabilities. One group was working on reducing stigma for those people living with HIV and AIDS, and improving access to community home-based care.

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The UN district profile of Doti highlights just what a tough place it is to live.  The adult female literacy rate is only 15%. 81 children per 1,000 born die as infants. Less than half the population has access to safe drinking water and only around 20% has access to decent sanitation. Doti also has the second highest rate of HIV infection in Nepal, because the chronic food insecurity has led to many men leaving their families to find work, especially in India, for months at a time.

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It was encouraging and sobering. Wonderful to get to know the UMN Doti staff, and the NGO partners they work with. I was marginally useful with the training, though my Nepali extends to session introductions and get-to-know-you conversations, not delivering training or facilitating discussion. We did, however, help them to focus on specific, achievable advocacy actions that will make a concrete difference in the lives of poor communities.  I think the mix of skills development, theory teaching, and practical advocacy plan development in the training was good.

And I also picked up the skill of drinking Nepali style, pouring water into my mouth without having the bottle or jug touch my lips and swallowing continuously as the water hits the back of the throat. Sweet.

And the first installment in my Doti photo gallery is here.

Thirty-five years ago an irrigation channel was built to bring water to the fields of a Kumal community in Dhading District. I won’t name the community because of sensitivities about the case. The Kumals are one of Nepal’s 60 or so Indigenous Nationalities, with a nation-wide population of around 100,000 according to the 2001 census. Their educational status and literacy rates sit below the national average.

The channel did what irrigation channels do, making it possible for people to grow a wider range of crops, to produce more food, to improve household income and family health.

Five years later another channel was built to take water to a nearby high-caste community – a community with  higher social status, better education, and better political connections. All the water from the first channel was diverted to this new one, although this was not legal at the time.

The higher-caste community had an age-old justification for what they had done. One they have repeatedly turned to in the thirty years since. “The Kumals,” they say, “do not know how to manage the water. They allow the channel to fall into disrepair. They waste the water. They do not grow the crops they should. The water should go to those who can use it properly.”

I’m a descendant of those who stole a continent from its Indigenous owners. I know how it goes.

In the thirty years since, of course, the original channel has fallen into disrepair. The accusations of the high-caste have become self-fulfilling prophecy, reinforcing the discriminatory stereotypes and affirming the “rightness” of the original injustice. The passage of time, too, hallows the arrangement. After 30 years, how can the Kumals complain that they have been deprived? The water has belonged to the higher-castes for as long as many in both villages have been alive.

Eventually, the Kumal community, with the assistance of a local NGO, formed a water users committee. The first aim of the committee was to establish a reasonable arrangement for sharing the water.

Although the Kumals have 11 of the 12 positions on the committee, the committee chair is a man from the high-caste community. “Without me”, he had said, “you will have no voice. You are not educated and you do not understand politics. Local officials will not listen to you and your community will receive nothing. You need someone to manage the committee and make sure it is effective.” The Kumals’ deeply internalised subordination and the sparing distribution of gifts and incentives ensured his election.

This man owns a mill powered by the water flowing through his community’s irrigation channel. Every day the water flows he is able to earn money grinding grain and spices in this mill.

When the water users committee meets, he keeps the records. The Kumals must go to his home and ask permission if they wish to see the minutes of any meetings, if they wish to find out what decisions or actions have been taken. They are aware that it is possible that government funds are available for the upkeep of the irrigation channels. They have no idea if any money has been given to maintain their own channel or that of the high-caste community.

After speaking to journalists, a story about their situation was broadcast on local radio. At the next meeting of the committee, it was agreed that each community should share the water with diversions to each channel on alternate days. Two months later, though, this agreement has still not been implemented. When the Kumals approach the high-caste community, they are told it is not possible. Their channel is still not good. They will waste the water.

They have been threatened with violence should they attempt to divert the water themselves. No one has yet suffered violence; the threats have been enough.

“Our soil is good,” a Kumal woman says. “If we had water we could grow anything here.”