BehanVox: Where Is The Money For Heat Action?
This week in BehanVox: a natural farming initiative in Andhra Pradesh, Kolkata rape case, India's own manosphere, and more
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox! This week we have for you two great articles on climate change – one on why heat financing has yet to find its feet in India and another on a fantastic natural farming initiative in the water starved Rayalaseema area of Andhra Pradesh. Plus gender news from across the country and the world and some great reading for the weekend.
Story So Far
In the blithe world we seemed to inhabit not too long ago, few of us know what a heat plan was or what heat financing was. Now that the climate reality has come to bite us in really painful places we have no choice but educate ourselves. The world’s most well-muscled nation has taken to denying these realities now and is also set on undoing a lot of gains we have accrued so far on climate change but that is not a path the world can afford.
Even as we write this, countries across western Europe that remained temperate and livable through summer months, are dealing with unbelievable heat levels. The southern parts of the continent are literally going up in flames. And in India we have been dealing routinely with searing summers, unpredictable storms, unexpected floods, excessive rains and equally unrelenting droughts.
In an extensive interview with three experts, Saumya Kalia lays open for us reasons why heat plans to help people, especially those from vulnerable social and economic groups, are just not being planned or executed optimally in India. And why they remain constantly underfunded and under-resourced. Nihal Ranjit from the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Uma Pal from the Climate Policy Initiative, and Apekshita Varshney from HeatWatch, to understand the politics and possibilities of heat financing explain to us the politics and possibilities of climate financing.
As you hear them speak you understand why seemingly small policy interpretations are failing us in our heat response. “We don’t have a dedicated fund for heat because heat is not notified as a disaster under the National Disaster Management Act, 2005. The NDMA has issued guidelines for heatwave management for states since 2016. States are able to use 10% of the State Disaster Response Funds (SDRF) available to them for ‘state-specified disasters’,” points out Apekshita.
Uma Pal points out that the reasons for this exclusion are historical and structural and we are only now waking up to the reality. “Historically, heat waves were not considered to significantly impact public health, well-being, or infrastructure systems, unlike other disasters such as cyclones or floods. Consequently, tracking heatwave data and acknowledging their impact, especially on vulnerable populations, has only recently become a focus as the occurrence of extreme heat events has increased over time.”
Nihal Ranjit points to the red tape that suffocates every initiative. “Heat and air pollution sit within very different institutional homes: air pollution falls under the purview of the Central Pollution Control Board within the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, whereas disasters like heatwaves are managed by the National Disaster Management Authority, which comes under the Ministry of Home Affairs,” he says.
India’s heat action plans tend to be reactive and crisis driven, not long term. Also despite a rise in heat action plans only a handful have found specific sources of finance.
How can the informal sector workers, many in MSMEs, be protected from heat impact without hitting the industry itself? Are there ways to support health impacts of heat that are not economically quantifiable? Can private sources be tapped for heat financing or global sources? Our interview has some answers.
Read our interview here.
The village of Muchukota in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh had laughed at Mutyalapati Bhanumati, 45, when she declared her to take a small farm on lease to do natural farming. This after all was the Rayalaseema area where the annual rainfall was well below half the national average and where farmers migrate in large numbers to cities to take on low-paid manual work.
But what seemed like a reckless enterprise nine years ago has now become an aspirational model for many others in her village. Bhanumati came from an agrarian family but she had been entirely caught up in carework and domestic work to have time for farming. But a government campaign in her village about the benefits of natural farming had caught her attention.
“Its cost-effectiveness model gripped me,” she says. “I had seen farmers borrowing to buy fertilisers and pesticides, only to lose their crops to drought. Some couldn’t bear the debt – they took their own lives.”
At the time, she anyway did not have enough money to invest in conventional farming using expensive fertilisers and pesticides. And natural farming seemed an ideal fit for the drought hit region because it left the soil moisture rich and needed less water.
Natural farming is a chemical-free, climate-resilient method that involves use of local resources like cow dung, cow urine and biomass. It reduces input costs and improves soil fertility through practices like mulching, intercropping, and microbial applications. Which is not to say it does not have its challenges – the intense labour, the long years the effort takes to show results, the lack of land ownership among women which prevents them from accessing government schemes.
But Bhanumati succeeded despite her systemic exclusion from formal entitlements as a tenant farmer. The inability to produce land documents denies women the right to claim damages during crop failure or to access input subsidies under schemes like Rythu Bharosa. Despite multiple applications, Bhanumati said, she was unable to secure a loan, claim compensation for crop damage caused by unseasonal rains, or receive any government benefits during her years as a tenant farmer.
Today she owns her fields, its crops and businesses.
Read her story here.
Talking Point
Deja Vu: If you thought the horrors of the RG Kar Hospital rape and murder case last August and its aftermath must have taught our politicians lessons in how to respond to sexual violence with compassion and firmness think again. Trinamool Congress leaders, reacting to the recent rape of a student of the South Calcutta Law College, came up with some mindless victim blaming: why was she alone at the time of the crime, why did she go where she went, why not avoid dark corners and bad men and so forth. No one had any suggestions on how to deal with the evident systemic links between politics and gender violence or how to keep campuses safe. And when party leader Mahua Moitra broke ranks to criticise TMC, the reaction turned even more sexist: from her recent marriage to relationships, everything was flung back at her.
Women Writing ‘Danmei’: China has cracked down on women who write gay erotica, a genre known as danmei. According to the BBC, at least 30 writers, nearly all of them women in their 20s, have been arrested across the country since February. Many are out on bail or awaiting trial, but some are still in custody and more are being summoned for questioning. They are accused of breaking “producing and distributing obscene material”. But explicit descriptions of “gay sex and sexual perversions” are treated with far greater censure than heterosexual intimacy.
India’s Own Manosphere: NewsMinute reports on the All Kerala Men’s Association (AKMA), a men’s activist group that stands in strong opposition to feminism, “arguing that women are already empowered and that gender-specific laws unfairly favour women, allowing them to manipulate the system for personal gain”. The report points to the celebrations held by the group when men accused of sexual violence walk free, such as Pulsar Suni, accused in the assault on a Kerala actor.
BehanVox Recommends
Slavery and caste: In this long read, Sreyartha Krishna documents the history of caste-based slavery in India, and the case of how one Dalit woman’s courage challenged this centuries-old system and hastened the promise of freedom for millions, 1841.
Rising conflict: In the backdrop of the escalating tension and strikes, Alex Skopic asks why United States’ elected leaders are scared of the possibility that Iran could get a nuclear bomb, and ignore Israel’s warheads and missiles.
Stigma and speech: In this personal essay, Rusha Chowdhury shares her insights on what it means to grow up as a stutterer in a world which forcefully demands fluency.
Online movement: Chloe W Shakin features the “We Do Not Care” Club, founded by influencer Melani Sanders, that celebrates women – in menopause and perimenopause – who have stopped trying to please everyone.
Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.
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