Tsunami Nagar

My fabulous roommate, Pasta, does sustainable livelihoods work in Chennai slums. She comes home each evening with mostly hilarious accounts of the day’s events. Sometimes, there’s a USAID audit and senior members of her organization are being taken to court, other times community workers are devising plans to invite Prabhudeva to an awards ceremony for the women’s self-help group. Such things make us laugh uproariously and slap our thighs with a gosh-darn-it-will-they-ever-learn.

Recently, she told me of her visit to Tsunami Nagar that left me depressed for days. When entire fishing communities lost their homes and businesses to the tsunami, a new settlement (i.e. slum) called Tsunami Nagar was built to rehabilitate them. Miles inland in the Chennai suburb, the fisherpeople were unable to access the sea, (i.e. their source of income and food). At the slum, they were forced to deal with sanitation and space issues that they had never encountered before. She was blunt, the slum resembled a toilet. Tsunami Nagar was apparently burned down in protest last year. The slum has been relocated a total of 3 times without a single improvement in conditions. Tsunami Nagar is supposed to be a temporary settlement before they get moved into permanent tennements which are built on the side of a hill resulting in the bottom houses getting submerged every monsoon season.

I consulted my friend Google and damn near fell off my chair when I found this Indian Express article (Jan 19th 2007):

"At least 35 women of Tsunami Nagar, where tsunami affected persons live in temporary shelters, were reported to have sold their kidneys for about Rs 40,000 to overcome financial problems, and were operated on in two private hospitals in Madurai." [link]

The aftermath of the tsunami saw the single largest global relief effort in history (an unqualified opinion); there was a sense of solidarity and humanity when people tuned in to their TV sets and really felt like they needed to do something. We felt connected to each other, didn’t we? I feel as though Tsunami Nagar represents the failures of the development sector. The intention is there, there is no denying that development agencies are crucial though subject to ridiculous bureaucracy which is the source of their limitations - but it’s time for reform. We need to start again, we need to hold true to the rhetoric of partnership building, we need to take capacity building seriously and not turn it into development jargon and mostly we need more common sense.

I am not deterred, lest you be mistaken. I am frustrated due to my head-on collision with How Things Really Work, but not deterred. They don’t teach you everything in a lecture hall, but that’s why there’s still room to learn. You have to be strong to be a foggy idealist but you have to be even stronger to maintain foggy idealism through head-on collisions.

The Petri Dish Analogy and The Angsty Anti-Developmentalist

NGOs in southern India make me think of alien bacetria things in a petri dish. If you are the person looking through the microscope then you are The Man, the microscope is the international donor organisation that will give you a different picture of what happens in the petri dish depending on your control over it, and the petri dish is swarming with single-cell organisms who supposedly work for poverty alleviation and in pursuit of reaching the Millenium Development Goals but they are too busy pushing their own agendas that they are unable to co-habitate in this one confined space. The problem comes from competition to access limited resources and the fact that there are just TOO MANY NGOs!!!! Each organisation competing with each other for the same bloody thing. I've read about this, I've heard about this, but this is the first time I am seeing how blatant it all is.

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You know what it is? I'll tell you what it is. It's that you can be into Edward Said and postcolonialisms and gender issues and comparative politics and third world histories and still be practial: engineer, advertising executive, teacher, doctor. Employable. I, obviously, have chosen otherwise.

No one told me what 'development' is. I abhor the notion that a student creates their own definition of development through an evolving process - it is not practical! The world already has their definition, they're replacing coal mines with wind turbines in the North, meanwhile replacing local grocers with Wal-Marts in the South. Why turn me into a chest-thumping, social-justice-loving diva if the world is just going to ruin the romance? Fuck you, world!

At university, we were never told the practical aspects of any of it. We were not told, look, here is a list of the different fields of development: gender, water, AIDS, renewable energy, micro-credit, etc, etc. Choose one and stick to it, because the workforce expect you to specialise!! My project management courses were tedious and uninspiring, I kept waiting for someone to bust out the "well, when I was in Africa.." line but even the obnoxious girl in the front couldn't be bothered. If they taught it well, if they taught it properly, IDS can be a useful and employable qualification. But they're too busy making girls like me fall in love with Amartya Sen and Vandana Shiva. And now I wonder, will Vandana Shiva donate me some skills sets, please?

Is it enough to have only opinions outside of academia? Because I have a basket full of really good ones, but it's pretty much all I have, and it's not transferable.