Caring for the elderly during the transition as the world comes back down to size will be tricky, Shubash Lohani agrees. And he’s not even talking about people.
Lohani, deputy director of World Wildlife Fund’s Eastern Himalaya Ecoregion Program, is in Lalmatiya, a town in southwestern Nepal just above the Indian border, visiting an old age home—for cows.
Lalmatiya is in Nepal’s Terai, a narrow strip of bottomland at the base of the world’s highest mountains and Lohani’s birthplace. Until the 1950s, the Terai was completely forested. It was also infested with malaria. The only inhabitants, the ethnic Tharu tribe, had an unexplained malaria tolerance—because, some believed, Tharu were direct descendants of Gautama Buddha, who was also born in Terai. In the 1950s, with help from the United States, the entire Terai was sprayed with DDT. As malaria was eradicated from successive areas, they were opened to settlement. Anyone who wanted could clear and claim land for free. Millions did, shearing most of the Terai’s trees, which mostly ended up as railroad ties in India.
Besides children—until recently, Nepalese families averaged seven—Terai settlers brought nearly one cow per human. This was a problem, and not just locally. The multi-chambered digestion of ruminants like cows and sheep involves much belching and flatulence. As the numbers of domestic animals worldwide, like our own, reached into the billions, their burps and farts account for around a quarter of human-related emissions of methane, a gas that traps twenty-one times more heat than CO2.
In Nepal and neighboring India, it’s even worse, because cows are considered sacred, and killing them is taboo. (Like India, Nepal is predominately Hindu. After Gautama Buddha’s birth gave rise to his eponymous religion, Nepalese have commonly observed both.) In the Terai, when cows get too old to give milk—the generous gift for which they are revered—owners release them in the forest. There they browse on saplings, their hooves compacting the soil so that little else grows. For World Wildlife Fund, this is serious: tigers, rhinos, and elephants are native to the Terai, as well as leopards, peacocks, macaques, and langurs, and what’s left of the forest is where they live.
There are also seven endangered species of vultures here—red-headed, white-rumped, cinereous, bearded, and Egyptian, as well as both Eurasian and Himalayan griffons—which led WWF to an imaginative solution to the cattle crisis. “We realized,” Lohani explains, “that they all were being poisoned by feeding on the carcasses of old bovines.” It turned out that farmers kept their aging cattle working by applying diclofenac, a painkilling ointment, that proved fatally toxic to the kidneys of carrion eaters. “So we donated ten thousand dollars to set this up.”
The sign reads, “Old Age Home for Livestock and Vulture Conservation Centre.” Behind it, several senescent, skinny cattle roam peaceably around a former eucalyptus plantation overlooking a dry riverbed. Here, before they get so arthritic that owners must slather them with diclofenac, cows are retired, fed, and finally given a respectful funeral with chanting, flowers, and incense on a ceremonial platform—which also serves as a dinner table for vultures. Because vultures are also venerated in the Hindu pantheon as nature’s cleaner, people here felt doubly blessed when six of the seven vulture and griffon species began showing up for meals.
Lohani, a stocky man in his mid-thirties with a green bill cap and shirt bearing the WWF panda logo, follows Moti Adhikiri, the elderly Centre director, down to the bombax trees growing along the riverbed. Three years earlier, there were just two vulture nests. Now there are 61. Besides four roosting griffons, Lohani also sees hornbills, drongos, pheasants, and red-vented bulbuls. Adhikiri has seen spotted deer, wild boar, blue bulls, Himalayan black bear, and—“For the first time in forty years, elephants and leopards are here!”
Lohani congratulates him and heads west, driving past miles of mud huts down Nepal’s two-lane Highway 1, weaving around throngs of people, goats, water buffalo, men on motor scooters with sari-clad wives riding sidesaddle, streams of bicycles, and thousands of cows. He is on a tour of slender landscape corridors that connect protected areas in Nepal and India that are home to Asian one-horned rhinos, Indian elephants, and the world’s highest concentration of Bengal tigers. Two hours later, he is standing in a rosewood thicket in what he calls one of the eleven lifelines keeping these animals alive. This one, the Khata corridor, links Nepal’s Bardia National Park with India’s Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary. Lifeline is not a casual metaphor: In places, the Khata corridor is only five hundred meters wide, and never more than two kilometers. Yet camera traps show elephants, tigers, and rhinoceros passing here between the two countries.
Keeping these corridors intact isn’t easy. “A few years ago there were twenty-three hundred illegal squatter households here,” says Lohani, leaning against a chipped concrete boundary marker, one foot in Nepal and the other in Uttar Pradesh. Saving nature in the Terai requires wrangling 5 million cattle, untold numbers of goats and buffalo, and 7 million settlers.
They’ve nurtured community forests around every settlement to replace trees that ended up as charcoal, rail ties, or roof beams. To dampen fuel wood demand, WWF has brought in solar panels, LED lighting, induction stoves, and biogenerators that yield cooking gas from vats of cow dung slurry and people’s privies. In an inspired stroke, they realized that this qualified for carbon offset credits that they could sell in international investment markets to finance more conservation. They’ve taught people to grow and press chamomile, citronella, mint, and lemongrass into marketable oils. They’ve negotiated tourism revenue sharing for people who live alongside wildlife preserves, such as the hundred thousand around the edges of Bardia National Park.
And they’ve brought family planning, no simple task in a country where a common wedding blessing goes, “May your children and theirs cover the hills.” World Wildlife Foundation isn’t a family-planning organization, but saving wildlife is pointless if humans then push them off the land. So they joined with government and NGO health partners to get funding from USAID and corporations like Johnson & Johnson for programs that help all creatures, human and otherwise. USAID, which had once soaked the Terai with DDT, was persuaded. In less than a decade, average family size in the area dropped from 8.5 children to 2.5.
Yet more arrive weekly, especially refugees from mountain communities washed away by melting glaciers. “We can’t eliminate overpopulation anytime soon, any more than we can get rid of greenhouse gases tomorrow,” says Lohani. “Both have been growing for a long time, and we’re bound to add more before we finally stop.”
Especially since, for all that they might accomplish in Nepal, they really have no control over the fate of this land. That resides at the other end of these corridors: in the country that in the next decade will surpass China as the world’s most populous. Lohani peers into India. Lately, its far northern reach is filling with Bangladeshis, whose own land is disappearing under rising waters. The refugees tell him they’ve come to this periphery to clear some forest and make a life.
“My dream,” he says, “is to have a landscape like in the Buddha’s time, when people and wildlife lived in harmony.”
In Nepal alone, that would be a challenge. But ecosystems know no borders, and what happens south of this boundary, Lohani knows, will determine Nepal’s future—and quite likely, the world’s.
Dr. G. S. Kalkat was speaking at Guru Nanak Dev University in the Indian state of Punjab when a student asked, “What do you consider the three biggest problems facing India?”
“Population, population, and population,” he replied.
Yet that would not have been the answer given by the worried people who, five years earlier, brought him back from retirement after a distinguished career at the World Bank and as a university administrator, to chair the Punjab State Farm Commission—exactly where he’d begun in 1949. To them, Problem No. 1 was what hydrologists were saying: that the water table below Punjab’s central wheat and basmati rice area in places was dropping ten feet per year. Wells that were 100 feet deep in 1970 had been rebored to 300 feet, then to 500 feet. New ones were going more than 1,000 feet down.
Monsoons that once lasted thirty days or more were down to ten or fifteen. Soils were turning saline. Although Punjab, the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined, makes up just 1.5 percent of India’s total land area, it is the nation’s pantry, growing 60 percent of its wheat and 50 percent of its rice. “We’re desperate,” say the three farmers in Dr. Kalkat’s office, two in purple turbans, one in yellow. What are they going to do?
They are going to do what their fathers did, he tells them: diversify their crops. Before 1970, in summer farmers grew corn, peanuts, a little cotton, some rice. In winter, wheat, legumes, and chickpeas. Back then, however, the population of India was less than half what it is now: 500 million, versus today’s 1.1 billion. Even then, many Indians were starving: they had exceeded the land’s carrying capacity. Kalkat was then Punjab’s deputy director of agriculture, having returned in 1964 after a doctorate at Ohio State, courtesy of a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship. That was just before Rockefeller scientists arrived here from their wheat improvement center in Mexico with new high-yield seeds.
They were calling the project, of which Kalkat became joint director, a “green revolution.”
“Our first crop season with the new wheat was 1968. We planted 1.6 million hectares. In 1969 came what IRRI called Miracle Rice. Before, we would get a ton of rice and 1.2 tons of wheat per hectare. Suddenly, our harvests were 4 tons of rice and 4.5 tons wheat. The only thing needed was irrigation. We sunk wells, because it was much faster than putting in dams and digging canals, which take ten to fifteen years. We could dig wells in one week. And that’s what we did, from 1968 to 1970. We still do.”
His voice grows softer as he reflects on what resulted from perforating the Punjab with 1.2 million wells. “We have 2.6 million hectares in rice. With the water table dropping so fast, we calculate that we must move a million hectares of rice into low-water crops: maize, pulses, and oil seeds like soy. Soy isn’t as high-yielding, but it’s priced higher. With luck, the farmers will be compensated. India is short of edible oils for cooking.”
His gaze rises toward his pale blue turban, as if to retrieve a thought.
“Stabilizing the water balance, so that what we use equals the annual recharge from rainfall, will take ten or fifteen years. But if we don’t also control population and bring ourselves into balance with natural resources, we’ll have a serious problem. Farmers will suffer. We’ll have social upheaval. Our immediate concern is water. But unless we do something in the next decade about population, we will have decided, en masse, to commit hydrological suicide.”
Sheela Kaur, her blue batik chunni framing a face hard as a mask, knows about hydrological suicide. Her husband, Prakash Singh, was only twenty-seven when he walked into their wheat field and opened a new can of Celphos. When he failed to return for lunch, his brother went to look and found his body.
Celphos is a trade name for aluminum phosphide, a fumigant for grains that is lethal to insects and rodents. It comes in powder or tablets; when exposed to moisture or humidity, it releases a colorless gas that smells like garlic. If that release occurs inside someone’s stomach, within minutes most internal organs fail. No one witnessed how much Sheela’s husband took, but four tablets is the customary dose in Punjab, where, according to Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, the Indian farmers’ union, forty to fifty thousand have similarly taken their lives in the past two decades. (Nationwide, reports India’s National Crime Records Bureau, 270,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995.)
“It is common,” Sheela says tonelessly, slumped on her woven cot, turquoise paint peeling from the walls around her. In her village, Kurail, some of her neighbors’ husbands have flung themselves in front of trains or off roofs, but ingesting pesticide is the symbolic death of choice here.
His watch hangs from her left wrist. The photograph she holds shows a slim, smiling youth standing by a river, wearing jeans and a jacket over a red shirt. Like many Punjab farmers, Prakash Singh had gotten into debt. Sheela had seen him grow worried as loans he took deepened along with the well he was digging. He had calculated costs for a 300-foot well, never dreaming that he would need to go 500 feet. Back in his father’s time, 45 feet would have been plenty.
Soon the moneylender, who charged 24 percent, was showing up early each morning to humiliate him in front of his family. He intercepted their three children on the way to school and asked for money. Another loan, with a bank, was secured by property Prakash owned with his brother, but men still came demanding payment, sometimes three times a day. Prakash promised to pay everyone when the wheat was in. But the harvest was disappointing.
“I never knew how much the well cost—men usually don’t tell women,” says Sheela. “Or they say it’s less than it really is. When he said that the only way out was to drink something and die, I told him that his mother and sisters and brother would stand by him. But they had their own debts, he knew. By the time he did it, I expected it. When someone gets like this, nothing can be done.”
She told her children that their father had an accident. Now her eldest son says he wants to farm. But with Prakash gone, he will have to marry off his sisters, so the debts will go on. Although dowries now are outlawed, every groom’s family still expects one. At the very least, some gold and a vehicle. Then there are clothes and jewelry for the bride, and a feast for a hundred neighbors. The fact that daughters are so expensive in northern India is one reason why, like India’s population growth, illegal ultrasounds and aborted baby girl embryos are surpassing rates in China. In the neighboring state of Haryana, the ratio in one town was down to 590 girls per 1,000 boys.
Suicide-by-pesticide widow, Punjab, India
In a way, says Biku Singh, it was easy to get farmers like himself indebted to the Green Revolution, because Punjabis already had a tradition of social debt. But going into hock for a few years to marry off a daughter was nothing like this.
“The price of everything is now ten times what it was, while the amount of water is ten times less.” By everything, he means labor, seed, pesticide, and fertilizer. Fertilizer keeps going up because the land needs more all the time; pesticide because insects develop resistance, so farmers must buy new kinds.
“And electricity: the deeper the water, the more you need to pump. It used to cost 200 rupees per acre. Today it’s 2,000.1 So you need a twenty-horsepower pump instead of ten. Half our people are sick from pesticides: heart attacks, high blood pressure, cancer. Our kids have skin diseases and bad eyesight. No matter how much they eat, they’re anemic. Their teachers call them slow learners. And their fathers, all of them two hundred thousand rupees in debt on every acre, are all suicides-in-waiting. We’re all on each other’s suicide watch.”
It is late May, a week shy of the monsoon that so far shows no sign of arriving. Biku, who has a dark, shaggy beard, is driving a dirt road along an irrigation canal choked with brown phosphate foam. Next to him is Labh Singh, a generation his senior. Both wear long white kurtas and billowing white pants. Biku’s turban is orange; Labh’s is smoky blue. They stop to inspect a field of sorghum fodder; the other fields are bare, their winter wheat harvested a month earlier. The 2011 yield was decent, but not enough to make up for a terrible 2010, when it was too warm. Now they await the rains to plant the flat, dusty land in rice.
There are no birds nor insects. In the corners of fields are mud-plastered cone-shaped silos for storing cow dung, which is used for fuel: there isn’t enough manure to fertilize all the crops they must grow to be Green Revolution farmers.
“Before the Green Revolution,” says Labh, “when we depended on nature for everything, we were more prosperous. Since the introduction of petrol and pesticides, our fortunes have fallen. In our subdivision, we have eighty villages, and we’ve had seven hundred suicides.”
As more farmers abandon their farms by abandoning their lives, land is being converted to housing, as ever more populous villages spread and merge with each other. Per capita alcohol consumption is among the world’s highest. By many accounts, the most lucrative business here is no longer agriculture but heroin grown in Afghanistan and smuggled over the border with Pakistan’s Punjab. When recent state government studies declared that nearly 75 percent of Punjabi youth were addicted, no one challenged them.
The Green Revolution made Punjab one of the wealthiest states in what is set to become one of the world’s wealthiest countries. But its legendary grain-based bounty, extolled in Bollywood the way cattle ranching was mythologized in Hollywood, is now collapsing. In a given year, harvests may still even set records. But every year, the water is farther away, and few are changing to heat-tolerant, low-water crops. “Nothing else pays enough,” says Biku.
“We’re stuck,” says Labh. “The more we have produced, the more our debt has risen. Our expenses are higher than our returns. And we’re all poisoned.”
The Green Revolution was never for farmers, they believe: it was for the rest of the country. Until the water started to vanish and accumulated chemicals and debts overwhelmed them, they were proud to be feeding their nation.
“Not just India: we fed the world,” says Labh. “Forty trains a day left Punjab carrying thousands of tons of grain. We grew enough to feed everybody. But now there are so many. And every year, we will be able to feed fewer.”
The neighboring state of Haryana was once part of Punjab. Just as the original Punjab was cleaved in two in 1947 when Muslim Pakistan broke from India’s western flank, in 1966 it divided yet again along sectarian lines, leaving Punjab populated mostly by Punjabi-speaking Sikhs, and Haryana mostly by Hindi-speaking Hindus. Yet another reason for the preternaturally skewed sex ratios in Haryana is a widespread belief among Hindus that passage to heaven depends on having a son to light his parents’ funeral pyres. Since the invention of ultrasound imaging, that has translated into vans equipped with portable machines driving from village to village in Haryana, and a robust trade in illicit abortions.
Although abortion has been legal in India since 1971, sex-selective abortion is punishable by both jail and fines. Enforcement, however, is so lax that by 2030, India could have 20 percent more men than women—a deadly prescription for, among other problems, jealousy-fueled violence and escalating rape. Although abortion preempts the killing or abandonment of unwanted baby daughters, mortality statistics reveal indirect infanticide through neglect: According to the United Nations, Indian girls are 75 percent more likely to die before their fifth birthday than boys, suggesting that they’re fed what’s left after their brothers have eaten.
Fertility has dropped in India in the new millennium, but Haryana is among ten of twenty-eight Indian states that remain well above replacement level. Unfortunately, those ten states contain half of India’s population. Another baby is born every two seconds in India, more than forty-three thousand a day, and more than 15 million a year: nearly two more New York Cities. Recently, government demographers revised their prediction that India would achieve stable population in 2045, with 1.45 billion people. They now say that population will keep growing until 2060, peaking at 1.65 billion. Given growth rates that even government cash incentives for delaying childbirth have failed to stem, few are convinced that this prediction will hold any more than the last one.
One simple thing might make a difference, however. Indian women who make it to secondary school average 1.9 children apiece. For those who graduate, it’s 1.6. The fertility rate among women with no education is 6.0.
And for decades, India needed to look no farther than its own southern tip for a remarkable example of how education and equality for females can change everything.
The Indian state of Kerala has been lauded internationally for showing how a poor society can nevertheless enjoy a high standard of living, if the standard is not wealth but quality of life. No child marriages, feticide, or gender imbalance here: Kerala actually has slightly more women than men, which is natural for our species. Since the 1970s, it also has the lowest fertility rate in India—a stunning reversal from 1947, when its population growth was the highest in newly independent India.
Yet today, Kerala is also a cautionary example of how tangled human ecology is in the twenty-first century, and of what we must avoid if we ever want to achieve a lasting peace—or to at least to strike a truce—with our own planet.
“If you look at tomorrow, your heart will break,” says Sugathakumari.
A revered Indian poet who writes in Malayalam, the language of her native Kerala, as she approaches eighty, Sugathakumari is not happy with our species.
“Animals, birds, bees, and flowers obey nature’s laws. Only one creature has broken them. I almost feel that the world would be a better place without us.”
Even Kerala? Where, despite incomes averaging only a few hundred dollars a year, in the 1990s they achieved 100 percent literacy? Kerala, which has India’s highest life expectancy, nearly that of the United States? And universal health care, equal status for the sexes, and schooling for all? And tropical wilderness where tigers and elephants still roam the steep forests of the Western Ghats, including the fabulous Silent Valley, a national park that Sugathakumari herself saved from government dam builders? Kerala, where a man who marries goes to live with his wife’s family, not vice versa?
“I don’t know what happened to Kerala,” she moans, her ceiling fan stirring her long, silver hair. “I don’t know what happened to Kerala’s women. I’m disgusted.”
The Kerala where she was born in 1934 contained what might have spelled trouble elsewhere in India: a 60 percent Hindu majority, with the balance equally divided between Muslims and Christians—mostly Catholic or Syrian Orthodox. (The latter claim to be descendants of Brahmins evangelized in Christianity’s early days, when the doubting apostle Thomas came to Kerala and founded seven churches.) But rather than ethnic strife, Kerala’s multiple religions dwelt in harmony. During the nineteenth century, a rare alliance among enlightened British missionaries, a benevolent young queen, a charismatic outcaste Hindu swami reformer, and several respected Muslim leaders had resulted in state-mandated schools for everyone, regardless of gender, creed, or caste—including slaves and untouchables.
In 1956, India’s former principalities of Hindu maharajas and Muslim Nawaabs were reorganized into linguistic states, including Malayam-speaking Kerala. In 1957, its pro-education caste reformists formed the world’s first democratically elected communist government. Since then, communists have held power frequently in Kerala, winning praise and votes for their commitment to public health and schooling.
Their success was due in part to realizing by the 1960s that Kerala had the fastest population growth in the country, an unintended consequence of improved medical care that slashed infant mortality and boosted longevity. A family-planning program began distributing newly available pills for free, emphasizing that fewer children are easier to educate. Modest payments were offered to whoever volunteered for vasectomies or tubal ligations. Compliance with family planning tracked directly with female literacy, allowing Kerala to escape Sanjay Gandhi’s “emergency” forcible sterilizations in the mid-1970s of more than 8 million Indian men and women—a barbarity that toppled the presidency of his mother, Indira Gandhi.
By the end of the 1990s, Kerala became the first place in India—and in all south Asia—to achieve replacement rate fertility. It was another social success for which democratic communism was credited, even as it was blamed for the state’s general economic shambles.
“Cashews, rubber, coir”—coconut fiber—“and agriculture: we had everything,” recalls Sugathakumari, who has no political affiliation, but whose campaigns for women’s and environmental rights flourished under the leftist governments. But the communists’ effectiveness at defending workers ultimately backfired. “They didn’t teach our laborers the prestige of doing their duty. They taught them to demand more and more wages, and to limit their workday. The laborers became very proud, very strong, very powerful. Their unions dictated terms to the people hiring them. And one by one, the factories closed.”
In 1957, Kerala’s first communist government capped the amount of land that citizens could own, redistributing holdings of important families among poor farm laborers. “On the one hand,” says Sugathakumari, “that was good for poor laborers. But our agriculture suffered. If you grow rice, you need big fields. As they were partitioned into smaller ones, the laborers lost interest. So they sold the land, and agriculture dwindled into something weak. It’s a sad thing to say.”
Outside the mental health shelter for women that she founded in 1985, a leaden sky signals the gathering monsoon. The storm that Sugathakumari fears, however, is one that has rained in from the Persian Gulf, flooding the streets of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital—with capital. This once-serene city that Mahatma Gandhi praised for its jungle-like lushness is now a cacophony of relentless commerce, much of it involving jewelry and surprising numbers of expensive cars.
It began with Kerala’s Muslims, once its poorest community. The decay of Kerala’s economy coincided with the rise of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and the other Arab petro-capitals. As those cities grew—and grew more lavish—plentiful construction work was just a hop across the Arabian Sea, and soon Kerala’s Muslims were returning no longer poor: they were driving foreign cars and wearing enough gold that Kerala’s highly educated Hindus couldn’t help noticing.
Migrating for work was nothing new: Most of Kerala’s stars—India’s first female supreme court justice, first female surgeon general, first female head of its stock market, and international literary figures such as novelist Arundhati Roy—made their careers outside the state. Because of their excellent schooling, employees from Kerala are prized; in Mumbai and New Delhi, companies routinely advertise for applicants from Kerala, especially independent women with no qualms about working in distant cities.
But now Keralites were bypassing professional careers in India, because even menial jobs in the opulent Arab Gulf paid better. It was said that Kerala had finally built its economy—but in the Gulf. However, the money that migrants brought back also changed the face of Kerala.
“All spent on gold, fancy boats, and luxury cars,” mourned Sugathakumari, as Kerala became India’s biggest market for Audi, Mercedes, and BMW. “So many shops, resorts, theaters, and hotels. Hundreds of new mosques built by wealth, looking like the Taj Mahal. More roads, more electricity, more river sand for cement, more land for even more buildings. More, more, more. That’s the slogan of today: ‘We want more.’ ”
Never had she seen so much gold jewelry. That was something she’d expect in northern India, where people compete to have the biggest weddings, the biggest jeweled necklaces and rings, the biggest dowries. And something else: “We’ve always had fathers, mothers, uncles, sisters, and grandparents living together, all sharing the family wealth. Now everyone wants separate homes, and freedom from family responsibilities.”
The deluge of materialism confounded the image of Keralans enjoying dignified lives on very low incomes. Kerala’s progressive social development and miraculously low fertility had been frequently extolled by Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen. In the 1990s, the “Kerala Model” became an inspiration for the UN’s Human Development Index that Sen developed with Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq—an alternative to GDP as the measure of healthy development. Kerala was cited repeatedly during formulation of the UN’s current Millennium Development Goals as a world-class example of gender equality, women’s empowerment, reduced maternal and child mortality, and universal health care and education.
Now, even the admiring Amartya Sen publicly worries about Kerala’s failure to develop a domestic economy to staunch the draining of its most highly educated brains to other parts of India and south Asia. “And when oil runs out in the Gulf,” wonders Sugathakumari, “what will happen to these people? If they come back, how can Kerala contain them all?”
They had done so much so well, she says. Not only could everyone read, but they did: Kerala is said to have the world’s highest per capita newspaper readership. They had the highest number of hospital beds per capita in India. They’d effectively mobilized against Coca-Cola’s overexploitation of groundwater, and led—and won!—the world’s battle to ban the endocrine-disrupting pesticide Endosulfan. They preserved enough forests that tigers, elephants, leopards, deer, Indian goats, four species of civet, wild boar, porcupines, pythons, and hairy-footed gerbils still shared Kerala with Homo sapiens.
On Sugathakumari’s desk is a photograph of herself surrounded by ferns in the Silent Valley they saved, singing one of her poems that inspired thousands to defend their natural heritage.
We bow to the trees with their sacred dreadlocks;
the forest gives us our life-breath
like Lord Shiva, who swallowed the poison
that would otherwise destroy the Earth…
“But then the money poured in like poison.” She shakes her head: all their achievements, undermined by temptation.
“We don’t know what will happen to Kerala now. As Gandhi said, there is enough for everyone’s need—but not for everyone’s greed.”
If Kerala—or Kerala before it was seduced by lucre—can’t be the future, then is it Mumbai? Is the densest mass of humanity in what soon will be the most populous country a glimpse of what’s next, if we don’t guide our demographic destiny?
Rukmini2 is used to the police. “Namaste—I salute the God within you,” she greets Inspector Sudhakar, her palms pressed together, fingers pointed heavenward.
In her gold-trimmed, shimmering red sari, Rukmini strikes an artful balance between demure and dazzling. Her long dark hair is tied with a deep red ribbon, which is also the color of the powdered part in her hair. On her forehead’s third eye chakra is a black bindi. This is a cryptic message: a vermilion head stripe is a bride’s symbol, while a black bindi is worn by widows or unmarried girls. Rukmini doesn’t know if she’s a widow, because her husband in Calcutta left after she bore her second child, yet another daughter. She managed a clothing store there to feed her two girls, but when they entered secondary school, she needed more money. A friend gave her the name of someone in Mumbai who needed a manager.
It wasn’t what she’d expected, but it’s worked out. She redid the interior of this tiled, British-era building—it was a brothel in colonial times, too—and made it a proper house, not like the dens of tiny cribs up and down the adjacent streets. She added faux marble flooring and paneling in the parlor, and installed wide plywood beds. In the street-level doorway where she waits every night, inviting and approving clients, is a shrine to the deities Lakshmi, Ganesha, and—because she’s from Kolkata—Kali. At the top of the staircase, there’s another.
Five of her thirteen girls are paraded out for the inspector and his two constables. The premium trade she caters to demands young girls, and they’re dressed accordingly. Only one wears a sari; the rest are in short skirts or diaphanous blouses with skin-tight pants. One wears a T-shirt that says “Human Being” in white letters stretched across a taut bosom. They sit on plastic chairs across from the sofa and smile at the officers through carmine lips. The officers stroke their moustaches, surveying the goods by the glow of standing lamps and an illuminated aquarium overfilled with goldfish.
“So little business tonight?” Inspector Sudhakar asks.
Rukmini indicates the hallway. “Only one. The rain keeps them away.” Outside, for the second night, the monsoon is pounding. On a normal evening, they’d have twenty clients. But life’s getting harder here in the red-light district of Siddharthnagar, a central Mumbai slum. Fears of HIV have cut into this historic business, but there’s no shortage of girls for the work: there’s a steady surplus of neglected unwanted daughters of Hindus who keep having babies until they get a son to light their funeral pyres. They come from the most populous states, where procurers prowl crowded villages, promising illiterate girls a chance to make money in Mumbai, possibly by getting bit parts in Bollywood films. Or husbands.
By the time Rukmini meets them, they’ve learned otherwise. “When they come crying,” she says, “I tell them not to get into this life. I tell them if they do, then earn your money fast and go back to your village, live with your parents, think about your children.”
The girls, all in their teens, glance at each other and titter. Things could be much worse for them. Nobody beats them here, like in Siddharthnagar’s cheap cages. Rukmini makes clients wear condoms. She takes her girls for medical checkups. Because she charges more than anyone on this street—350 rupees, about US$6.35—they don’t have to go with unbathed men who live under tarps. They’re fed. They can go shopping by themselves, or pray in the temple or church or mosque. And they’re free to leave when they choose. So far, these girls aren’t going anywhere. Most wouldn’t be welcome back home anyway, although the money they send is. And the ones from Nepal and Bangladesh—in high demand for their beauty—don’t ever want to leave Mumbai, where there is actually money to make.
Prostitution is illegal, but Rukmini and the police have an understanding. “If these girls couldn’t work, there would be a terrible increase of rape in this city. Most of the men we get have left their families to work in Mumbai. They’re away from their wives for so long, and like everyone, they need sex. If these women weren’t here, this city would go insane.”
An hour later, as the police make ready to leave, a young john emerges from a back room, a Nepali girl in a black sari behind him, carrying the sheets. He stops when he sees constables in black caps and gold braid with truncheons, but they wink and wave him off. Usually Rukmini locks the door when the law visits, but this one was already here. She accompanies Inspector Sudhakar and his constables downstairs. As they leave, several drenched men who’ve been waiting outside rush in.
Rukmini greets them and leads them up, pausing to pluck a spent lily from the pile of blossoms at the Lakshmi icon’s feet. Morning, evening, and midnight she performs puja, showering these deities with fresh flowers and prostrating before them.
“My girls and I know we’re guilty of a mistake,” she says. “I admit that, and pray for their blessed forgiveness.”
Back in their mobile unit, a Mahindra jeep, the three policemen crawl through the Siddharthnagar streets. Things are improved since Mumbai brought in paving stones; before, the narrow lanes turned to soup during monsoon. But pavement hasn’t sped up traffic, because the roads are also used by pedestrians, as sidewalks have been usurped by blue, yellow, and red tarps, under which everyone is either cooking something, repairing something, or just living, often with goats.
With the downpour now a drizzle, swarms of men in rolled-up pants, and women hiking their saris with one hand as they clutch babies with the other, negotiate the puddles. The police’s windshield is screened with heavy mesh against stone pelting, but what they really need is a cowcatcher to deflect humans. Earlier, at noon, several solid blocks here were filled with rows of kneeling Muslim men in prayer caps, overflowing the red-light district’s forty-eight mosques. Most are still here, among the throngs of resident SC/STs—“scheduled caste/scheduled tribes,” bureaucratese for untouchable—whose Hindu temples are equally numerous. Thousands cluster around tarps, where people make chapatis, stir dhal, fix computers, mend clothing, hawk electronics, cobble shoes, and milk goats. Yet for being stupefyingly jammed, Siddharthnagar is surprisingly congenial.
“God’s gift to Mumbai,” says Inspector Sudhakar, “is that people are mostly respectful. It comes from the dharmas, which tells us to be compassionate and understanding.” In all his years, he has used his .38 revolver only once, during the 1993 sectarian riots that killed nearly a thousand, mostly Muslims. That ended with thirteen bombings across the city on a single March day, widely believed to have been masterminded by the don of Indian organized crime, Dawood Ibrahim, who operated from a Siddharthnagar tailor shop, encoding secret messages in his stitching. Today, the worst problems involve not violence, but the stresses of infrastructure whose limits have been sensationally exceeded.
“There’s no place to park, so people leave autos on the street. The whole city is like a used car lot. We’re lucky that only fifty a day get stolen.”
But other than an occasional terrorist attack from Pakistanis next door, things are amazingly calm. “That is fortunate, because our manpower is stretched as these mobs keep getting bigger. At least we’re not Karachi. The difference is because here,” says Inspector Sudhakar, “everyone works. When everyone has employment, no one has the time or need to break the law. Mumbai is a lot safer than New York.”
Has Mumbai, née Bombay, somehow suspended the laws of physics? It is swollen beyond anyone’s comprehension. Traffic is beyond berserk. Lanes are ignored or nonexistent, horns insistent, construction cranes omnipresent. Everywhere are legions of humanity, picking their way over eternal building rubble, weaving between stalled cars, or leaping sidewalks and road dividers in motorized rickshaws. Greater Mumbai, population 21 million though nobody really knows, is the archetypal new megalopolis. When India becomes the most populous country, metro Mumbai will be closing fast on shrinking Tokyo for the dubious distinction of being the world’s largest city.
The difference, however, is that Tokyo is in hyper-developed Japan, while half of India is still in mud huts or under tarps. Yet this city, its biggest human crucible, somehow works—because everyone here is working. Anybody in India who wants a job can come to Mumbai and either find or make one. And they do, about a thousand more each day. With its deep-water harbor, Mumbai is India’s principal port and its financial, business, and entertainment capital. Forty percent of the country’s tax revenues come from this humongous city. With its Bollywood and coastal real estate, it would be south Asia’s Los Angeles—if Los Angeles were this solvent.
There is so much work here because of the perpetual construction, regardless of diluvial monsoons and temperatures that even in winter can approach 100°F. Just before June rains, 107–110°F is not unknown. To see Mumbai enter a monsoon is like watching a stew come to full boil. The atmosphere jells, heat waves ripple from pavement, asphalt perspires shiny beads of tar. But nothing stops. If anything, Mumbai accelerates, as construction turns feverish ahead of ruinous downpours, and colored tarpaulins are rigged over the gaps between soaring new properties-in-progress.
It is a city devoid of vacant lots. Between every pair of new skyscrapers are more ubiquitous tarps, with people who arrived yesterday living under them. Beneath affluent high-rises along the waterfront, people dwell in drainage pipes. Wherever there’s a wall, bridge, or abutment, tents are strung by migrants. They come willing to work any job, high on a bridge or deep down a hole. First the laborer arrives, then his brothers, then an entire generation of relatives accompanying his wife, then they have kids. When they’ve worked long enough to amass scraps of metal or loose concrete chunks, walls slowly rise to meet the oilcloth roof, and then there’s another slum.
Nobody chases them away, because they’re productive. Over past decades, it’s been China with the huge young labor force. But with China now aging, it’s India’s turn for what demographers call the population dividend, and a cornucopia of labor runneth over in Mumbai. Even the richest man in town, Mukesh Ambani, chairman of the energy and materials conglomerate Reliance Industries, who’s built a twenty-seven-floor, four-hundred-thousand-square-foot home for his family, doesn’t run off the neighbors living in the cracks between the surrounding buildings, because his mansion needs a staff of six hundred.
Mumbai is one of the few places on Earth where there is 100 percent employment, where literally anybody can find work—unlike its gloomy megacity alter-ego five hundred miles up the Arabian seacoast, Karachi. Mumbai may lack Karachi’s menace—but what will happen when it’s all built?
Building is what Krishna Pujari is worried about—not that they’ll stop, but that Dharavi, where he lives and makes his living, is where the developers have fixed their crosshairs next, and they’re going to build him out of business. Until recently, Dharavi claimed to be the biggest, most densely agglomerated slum in Asia. By 2011, however, the Times of India reported that Dharavi had been surpassed by four others—all of them also in Mumbai.
Still, Krishna declares, none has the sheer presence of Dharavi, an expanse of tarps and tin roofs reaching the horizon, so close together that when seen from the tracks above—Dharavi is wedged between two commuter rail lines—it seems possible to stroll across them and never touch ground. And they are seen from those tracks by millions daily, because Dharavi is practically in the middle of Mumbai’s financial district, on sublimely valuable real estate that has developers drooling and scheming.
In the seventeenth century, before the British East India Company appeared, Mumbai was a clutch of fishing villages on seven islands. The British built causeways to connect them, encircling what became Bombay Harbor. By the nineteenth century, the gaps between the islands had been filled. Where Dharavi sits today was once under water—its name means “waves”—and frequently is again when monsoons engulf the open sewers.
In Dharavi’s dark passageways, most barely broad enough for two adults to pass, a million people work in ten thousand small industries, under conditions that would burst dials off occupational health and safety meters, if such things existed. In warehouses with scorched asbestos walls, blackened men melt scrap aluminum soda cans into ingots. Nearby, other men salvage empty five-gallon vegetable-oil tins by immersing them in cauldrons of water heated over indoor bonfires to boil away the residues. Alongside them, women scrape off loosened labels while mopping their faces with limp cotton saris. Above, smoke gathers like a low-hanging thundercloud as it slowly bleeds through a hole in the ceiling. The room clangs like a giant bell as more men flatten tins too damaged for reuse.
Two streets over, Krishna Pujari greets by name every man who, for a stretch of several blocks, recycles cardboard—saving what can be stamped with a fresh logo, shredding the rest to mulch into new cardboard. He pops his head into rooms where flocks of children salt cowhides headed to China for tanning, a business employing forty thousand Dharavi citizens. He proceeds to Kumbharwada, a ten-acre sector where twenty-two hundred families—mothers, fathers, swarming kids—turn truckloads of clay hauled from rice paddies north of Mumbai into ornamental ceramic pots. These are some of Dharavi’s original tenants; their pottery works are licensed cottage industries, which Gandhi promoted. On homemade wheels, they throw thousands of flowerpots, wrapping each in clothing scraps that burn off as they’re fired in hundreds of mudbrick ovens.
This was one of Dharavi’s more benign industries, until cotton clothing gave way to polyester.
“I warn them,” Krishna says, “that fumes from melting nylon are toxic. ‘We have to work,’ they say. ‘Show us a better way, and we’ll use it.’ ”
Krishna Pujari’s own way is entrepreneurial. A whiplike, smiling man in jeans, polo shirt, and gold chain, he was thirteen when he came in 1993 from a farming village near Mangalore, the second oldest of nine children. He put himself through secondary school carrying tea to office workers, and when more of his brothers arrived, they started servicing cafeterias. Waiting tables one day, he learned from a British expat that tourists in Brazil actually hire guides to show them dirt-poor favelas above Rio de Janeiro. Since 2006, he’s run Reality Tours & Travel, offering guided trips through Mumbai slums to around twenty tourists a day who pay to see abject poverty.
Recently, he’s begun bicycle tours that begin at dawn at Dhobi Ghat, the vast outdoor laundry where linens from Mumbai’s hospitals and hotels are scrubbed and hung to dry. He’s done well enough to bring a wife from his village, a marriage his parents arranged. His latest venture is the computer class he started in a long, dark room whose floor is lined with a dozen old terminals. In front of each sits an intent barefoot child, half of them girls, including three in headscarves. “We’re teaching them skills of the future,” Krishna says proudly.
He continues on, dodging barefoot children retrieving balls from open drains that froth with gray bubbles, past doorways emitting the sharp tang of lye, where men and women carve three-foot-high brown blocks of the laundry soap they make into bars. Above their heads hang plastic bottles of colored liquids, each a different scent for the dish detergents they also make. Farther above, beyond the ceiling, is where they live. Nearly all of Dharavi’s people live above their workplaces, but it’s too tight here for staircases, so sleeping quarters are accessed by ladders clamped to exterior walls.
Krishna climbs one that leads to a roof—which, like every other rooftop in sight, is covered with kaleidoscopic piles of crushed plastic that’s been washed and spread on tarps to dry. Plastic is the biggest Dharavi industry of all. It arrives by truck in huge sacks from around the world: salvaged water bottles, plastic cutlery, hospital waste, cruise ship waste, spent plastic bags, and mountains of synthetic-fiber clothing. Dharavi plastic pickers have contracts with hotel chains and entire airlines for their disposable cups, knives, forks, spoons, and coffee stirrers. “What looks like garbage to others, to us is gold,” Krishna says.
In an alleyway below, women separate all this scrap plastic by color into dozens of milk crates, while a girl in a paisley hijab serves them tea. From here it is bagged and hauled farther up the alley to cast-iron grinding machines built from retrofitted truck flywheels, which spit sparks and billowing plastic dust. The pulverized results are dunked and doused in a succession of fifty-five-gallon drums, then taken up top to dry. Finally, they’re rendered in vast vats into molten polymer soup, whose acrylic stench suffuses the alleys where more women are sorting used swizzle sticks and stacks of lipstick-stained plastic airline cups, and men strip insulation from enormous tangles of copper wire.
The plastic gets poured into molds, producing pellet-sized nurdles to be shipped and remelted into consumer goods: so-called “added value” whose profit margins Dharavi never sees, except for what gets molded right here into miniature temples, plastic deities, cruciforms, and other trinkets. The curios of the world are no longer confected by the world’s artisans, but mass-crafted by its slum dwellers.
A few blocks later, Dharavi’s acrid aromatics dissolve into something actually inviting. Krishna drops into a basement bakery, one of hundreds here that make cakes, biscuits, bread, and savory curry-flavored pastries. He accepts a piece of a wheel of pappadam, stretched to dry across a straw basket.
“Few people realize that tons of food that Mumbai eats daily is made here—the labels don’t say where.” Neither do many know that Dharavi’s combined annual income is an estimated $665 million. Mumbai’s financial rajahs have other plans for this prime location: a contentious Dharavi Redevelopment Project involving blocks of high-rise apartments, offices, hospitals, shopping malls, and multiplexes is scheduled to begin momentarily. Everything else will be demolished.
“Everybody’s fighting it. But the government says whether you agree or not, we’ll do it, because we own the land.” And if they’re all kicked out?
“We’ll go farther north. And build many more Dharavis.”
Human-rights advocates often argue that the world’s poor are unfairly targeted for population control, because collectively they leave a much smaller footprint on the planet than the overprivileged few. That was surely true a half-century ago, when two-thirds of the world’s humans were peasants. Today most are urban—and most of them are urban poor. However ragged they may be, Dharavi’s rabble increasingly carry mobile phones; the electricity they use to charge them may be pirated, but generating it produces carbon nonetheless. The stupendous Mumbai traffic grew even more demented with the introduction of Tata Motors’ Nano, powered with a rickshaw engine and designed to sell for US$2,000 so that everyone might afford one. Most Dharavi dwellers probably can’t—but their children, already learning to colonize the twenty-first-century cyberscape, probably will. With the roads and rail tracks of Mumbai lined by more multistory housing for miles in all directions except seaward, their cumulative demand will broaden that footprint across what was once farmland and home to myriad tropical fauna.
The ancient Hindus saw those fauna not as creatures beneath ourselves, but as manifestations of the many faces of God. The first four avatars, or incarnations, of the life-affirming deity Vishnu weren’t humans, but animals: a fish, a tortoise, a boar, a lion. Hanuman, the great warrior deity of the Ramayana, is depicted as a monkey. And one of the most venerated aspects of God in the entire Hindu pantheon is Ganesha, the elephant-headed overcomer of obstacles.
At Mumbai’s Siddhivinayak Temple, which is dedicated to Lord Ganesha, the usual multitude has gathered despite the afternoon’s wall of rain. It is Tuesday, the most auspicious day for Ganesha worship according to Hindu astrology. Bearing bouquets of marigolds and hibiscus, five hundred thousand people shuffle barefoot in snaking lines past several metal detectors, toward an elephant-headed effigy seated in half-lotus on a gilded throne draped with garlands of flowers. According to legend, the two-and-a-half-foot-tall icon, carved from a single chunk of black slate, was discovered buried in a field. Today it is coated with red lacquer and encrusted with diamonds. Ganesha wears a gold crown and rings on his four hands. His trunk swings to the right, signifying that he fulfills all desires. The pilgrims who leave flowers, sweets, and fresh fruit by the carved wooden image of Kroncha, Ganesha’s pet mouse, come to beg the deity’s protection for their marriages, their newborns, their new homes. For those far in back, a Sony monitor overhead shows the devotional puja service, where, to the echo of kettledrums, the choicest of these gifts are laid directly at Ganesha’s holy feet.
“The elephant is huge, strong, and intelligent,” says pandit Gajanan Modak, Siddhivinayak Temple’s head priest, a thickset man in a gold-trimmed white dhoti. “Like humans, elephants have religious rituals. They mourn their dead, and bury them with branches and leaves. They have sharp eyes, and deep emotions.”
But unlike humans, India’s elephants are now endangered, and humans are outnumbering and imperiling all the animal aspects of God in the pantheon. In Mumbai, the Parsi Zoroastrians, who believe that burial and cremation contaminate the Earth with impurities, have always left their dead atop holy towers for vultures to consume. But now the birds have disappeared, felled by the same cattle ointment that devastated Nepal’s carrion-eating birds. The Parsis are left to try decomposing bodies with solar concentrators.
When Mumbai’s vultures disappeared, feral dogs and cats proliferated, causing a rabies epidemic. “We humans are a problem,” Modak says. “When we perform puja, afterward we pour the rice and flowers into the river as offerings for the fish. But nowadays people stuff them into plastic bags that end up in the sea.” There is a need, he says, to measure the number of people this world can contain. In Hinduism, there is no proscription against using any means available to do that. “Hindus have always planned their lives. Modern life requires modern planning.”
But is there not a need to bear children until a son is born to light his parents’ way into heaven?
“A myth. I have two daughters. They are as capable as any man to light our funeral pyres.”
He serves prasad—yogurt and honey, blessed during puja—to his guests. “We are bringing the Kali Yuga upon ourselves,” he says. “That is when we destroy our environment and kill ourselves. Even the smallest insect has a reason to be in this world. We are all creatures connected with each other. Lord Ganesha has his mouse, to whom we bow and ask permission to venerate our lord. Lord Krishna has his divine cow, Saraswati her swan, Lakshmi her owl. Hindus accept that we can’t live without animals. If they survive, we survive.”
Along with his sacred cow, the blue avatar Lord Krishna is always shown with his beautiful lover, the supreme goddess Radha.
“She is nature, the mother of us all. Krishna, like Jesus and Buddha, is the incarnation of God in human form. He represents the human population. They are the ideal couple we must strive to be: humanity and nature, in perfect balance. In perfect harmony. In perfect love.”