[HumJanenge] Spurious Awards, Bogus Campaigns, Sunita Narain CSE Lost Credibility

Spurious Awards, Bogus Campaigns, Sunita Narain CSE Lost Credibility

 

CSE under Sunita Narain had gradually lost her credibility that her Rs.50 crore a year NGO CSE has come down to de-rate Indian Judiciary. In the capital itself where she is located since 1982 she completely failed on all fronts she often claim credits for PILs filed by Mehta and others and won so many Spurious Awards based on bogus claims.

 

This manipulator Sunita Narain got equivalent of Nobel Prize 'Stockholm Water Prize' for actually promoting Rainwater Harvesting that don't work, I have been campaigning for 7-8 years that RWH structures don't work and cost of capital harvesting structures is Rs.1500 per kiloliter that generally don't work to just Rs.10 per kiloliter for Renuka Dam that shall serve 100 years or more.

 

Water supply in Delhi is worst in the world – water pressure is practically zero, every consumer has to install in line booster pump and storage tanks. In rural India we are told to install septic tank 100 feet from hand pump but in Delhi Sewage Lines and old leaking Water Lines providing intermittent supply run within 2-3 feet of each other.

 

'In 2005, the Centre and she were awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, considered the Water Nobel for work on building an informed public opinion on the need for decentralised water management and rainwater harvesting.'

 

There is no let up in Fly Ash in air in Delhi even though IP and Rajghat Coal fired stations were shut down for almost a decade. Every time there is light shower Fly Ash deposits can be seen on cars released by Badarpur Thermal Plant.

 

There is no progress in Sewage & Drainage released in to Yamuna by Haryana that is source of potable water supply.

 

Pollution level in Delhi is very high because of rapid growth of automobiles in Delhi and also diesel cars.

 

Average mileage of recently introduced Marcopolo CNG buses is 2 kilometer per kg against 5 kilometers per kg for Tata buses.

 

Fare charged by AC buses or Delhi Metro is more than Airline Fares in per kilometers.

 

In ten years she tested and found 'Pesticides' in Coca Cola only but not in our DJB water supply. Finally DJB on its own recently admitted its water supply is contaminated and consumers had install Water Purification units.

 

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050608/main7.htm

http://cheminova.dk/download/Indien/cancer_study_report.pdf

She took blood samples of professional pesticide sprayers and announced Punjab has 15-605 times more pesticide in their blood than Americans. Cotton area in Punjab is barely 5% of gross cultivation where pesticides were extensively used prior to introduction of Bt Cotton. Cancer study found firstly Bikaner that grows no cotton has higher Cancer rate than Bhatinda district of Punjab famous for Cotton cultivation and secondly Urban population has higher cancer rate than rural cotton growing area.

 

CSE has gone down in to pits here – questioning the Credibility of Supreme Court Judges but not telling us about her Gross Failures, Incompetence, Manipulations and Anti Multinational Agenda – more importantly not taking any patent since 1982 wasting over Rs.2000 crores of public aid in today's money with interests.

 

CSE securing all the Donations and AID through frauds.

 

90% of the problems we have in India are due to incompetent NGOs like CSE who waste $3b of aid every year and run politicized campaigns.

 

Ravinder Singh

September17, 2011

 

http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/fine-line-judges

The fine line for judges

Issue: Sep 30, 2011

 

Judges have recused themselves in a number of cases but there are no clear guidelines on what constitutes conflict of interest

 

Last week just as Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Novartis was set to begin its final arguments in the Supreme Court against the rejection of a patent for its cancer drug Glivec (see 'Evergreen Novartis', Down To Earth, September 1-15) there were two swift and stunning developments. A letter was written by five activists complaining to the ministers of law, commerce, health and family welfare about Justice Dalveer Bhandari, one of two judges hearing the case.

 

The complaint was that Justice Bhandari had been attending international conferences on intellectual property (IP) matters organised by the Intellectual Property Owners Association (ipoa), a lobby group of the world's top IT and pharmaceutical companies of which Novartis is a member. The letter was written on September 5 and a report in The Times of India quoting from it appeared the next day. Within hours Justice Bhandari had recused himself from the case.

 

Recusal is to remove oneself as a judge in a particular proceeding, usually because of conflict of interest. However, no reasons are given when a judge recuses himself. This was the case last month when Justices P Sathasivam and A K Patnaik recused themselves from hearing the corruption charges against dmk Member of Parliament Kanimozhi. Recusals in IP cases, though, tend to be more interesting if not controversial for several reasons, not least because global giants are involved in these suits. Justice Bhandari is the second Supreme Court judge to recuse himself from the Novartis case, the first being Justice Markandey Katju. In both cases, the views expressed by these judges on IP laws, one in a Supreme Court journal and the other in a presentation made at the International Conference of Judges hosted by ipoa, had a bearing on their decision—voluntary in the case of Katju—to remove themselves from the Novartis case.

 

What the drug giant has been challenging is a crucial section (3d) of India's patent law that bars drug companies from patenting new forms of a patented substance unless it can prove gains in efficacy. This is aimed at preventing IP owners from extending their patents through incremental innovations that do not add much value. It is part of India's attempt to balance the rights of patent holders with public healthcare interests related to access and affordability of medicines in a largely poor country. The law in that sense is unique in many ways.

 

Justice Bhandari is a keen proponent of IP laws and had attended a UN conference on the subject even in the 1990s. Going by the article that the activists' letter has cited, the judge believes that "there is urgent need to educate the masses regarding importance and benefits of protection of IP Rights" and that pharmaceutical and other patent holders from developed countries "have bounden duty and obligation to educate people" by organising seminars, symposia and debates. The more contentious part of this otherwise pedantic article is his exhortation that "they must make all efforts to ensure that all countries are persuaded to enact proper laws". Would this imply that India did not have "proper laws"? Or was it a general recommendation that he was making? He also thinks the World Intellectual Property Organization has a signal role to play in this crusade.

 

Justice Katju's world view on IP appears to be the exact opposite. In the 2004 article written just before India introduced product patents as required by the World Trade Organization, he writes: "A balance has to be struck between the need to give monetary inducements to new inventions and making available these inventions to the broad masses in the underdeveloped countries at affordable prices." The larger backdrop to this controversy is the sophisticated lobbying that has been taking place in India over the past seven-eight years to "educate" judges on the benefits of IP protection. It's not just IP owners but also American law schools which are involved in the exercise to superimpose the developed world's model of IP protection on India's more balanced laws (see 'Insidious India Project', Business Standard, March 4, 2010). This column has been regularly highlighting the implicit dangers of such indoctrination (see 'Why do judges need to be 'sensitised'?', Down To Earth, August 15, 2010).

 

But the question here is whether either of these articles has an appearance of bias that would influence judgement. While the jury is out on this, what is clear is that we need more comprehensive guidelines on judicial transparency in determining issues of conflict of interest. It cannot be just a declaration of their wealth. It also has to be a listing of the facilities (free hospitality for spouses, for instance), gifts and honorarium that judges receive while attending conferences and lectures. What is equally important is for everyone to know who the organisers are and what their agenda is. In many a case the judges themselves are clueless on this.

 

Latha Jishnu

 

Senior Editor, Down To Earth.  Her concerns relate to the way power structures in society – business corporations, governments and lobbies – impact the lives of the powerless.

 

Sunita Narain

 

Sunita Narain has been with the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) since 1982. She is currently the director general of the Centre and the director of the Society for Environmental Communications and publisher of the fortnightly magazine, Down To Earth.

 

She is a writer and environmentalist, who uses knowledge for change. In 2005 and again in 2008 and 2009 she was included by US journal Foreign Policy as one of the world's 100 public intellectuals. In 2005 she was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government. She has also received the World Water Prize for work on rainwater harvesting and for its policy influence in building paradigms for community based water management. In 2005, she also chaired the Tiger Task Force at the direction of the Prime Minister, to evolve an action plan for conservation in the country after the loss of tigers in Sariska. She advocated solutions to build a coexistence agenda with local communities so that benefits of conservation could be shared and the future secured. She is a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Climate Change.  As well as the National Ganga River Basin Authority, chaired by the Prime Minister, set up to implement strategies for cleaning the river.

 

Narain began her work in the early 1980s, as a co-researcher with Anil Agarwal, an eminent and committed environmentalist who gave the country its environmental concern and message. In 1985, she co-edited the State of India's Environment report, which built an understanding in the country on why India is so important for the poor. With Anil Agarwal she learnt that environment and development are two sides of the same coin and that for the millions of poor, who live on the margins of subsistence, it a matter of survival. In 1989, learning from the successful initiatives of people to manage their environment, Anil Agarwal and she wrote Towards Green Villages advocating local participatory democracy as the key to sustainable development. She has continued to research and write about how environment must become the basis of livelihood security of people in the country. She has also linked issues of local democracy with global democracy, arguing that every human being has an entitlement to the global atmospheric common.

 

Building CSE

 

She has devoted time to build the capacities of the CSE so that it can function as an independent and credible institution, influencing public opinion and advocating change. Today, with over 120 full time staff, it is actively engaged in a variety of programmes spanning issues of water management, to rating of industries in terms of the environmental performance and training. CSE is an institution, which believes in the need to use knowledge to bring about change. In other words, it is about "working India's vibrant democracy". The challenge for CSE is to raise concerns and to participate in seeking answers and more importantly, in advocating for the answers to become policy and then practice.

 

Combating air pollution

 

Air pollution is an extremely serious problem, which damages the respiratory system and can lead to mortality as well. Narain, working with her colleagues at CSE, has been actively engaged in advocating for air pollution control. She believes that the answers to the growing problems of pollution will be in reinventing the growth model of the Western world so that we can leapfrog technology choices and find new ways of building wealth, which will not cost us the earth. It is in this context that Narain and her colleagues advocated for the introduction of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) in Delhi, to reduce air pollution. The successful implementation of CNG in buses in the capital has lead to substantial reduction in air contaminants and has become a model for the rest of the world.  As a member of the statutory body, set up under the Environment Protection Act and under mandate from the Supreme Court, the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority for the National Capital Region, she continues to monitor and implement strategies for reducing pollution in Delhi and in other cities across the country.

 

Making water everybody's business

 

Water is clearly most important asset for the country. For Sunita Narain it is an issue of great passion as she devotes time to research and advocate for the need to change the paradigm of water management in the country. She began work in this area with her colleague, Anil Agarwal, as she discovered the fascinating ingenuity of communities to harvest rainwater across the country. Research lead to their book, Dying Wisdom and then later a book entitled, Making Water Everybody's Business. Since then she has continued to build an understanding of the need for water security, using rainwater harvesting to augment resources and pollution control to minimise waste. She believes that her biggest contribution would be to build a strong and vibrant movement for water literacy in the country. In 2005, the Centre and she were awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, considered the Water Nobel for work on building an informed public opinion on the need for decentralised water management and rainwater harvesting.

 

It is in this context that Narain has argued that the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme public funds to create public assets with the labour of poor people. And the opportunity lies in using such labour to build assets: drought relief for relief against drought. Today, the national rural employment programme is already the world's biggest ecological regeneration effort – just under a million water bodies being dug, desilted or renovated by people. Now we must make sure these water bodies are not just holes in the ground, but will capture the next rain and recharge the aquifer. Her work to build awareness on this issue continues.

 

Food and water safety

 

In 2001, CSE set up a state of art laboratory to analyse contaminants in water and food so that it could undertake science for ecological security. In 2003 and 2004, under Narain's direction, the Centre analysed bottled water and then carbonated beverages for pesticide content. The aim of the study was to understand the extent of contamination of our groundwater and food systems and to use this research for reform. The study lead to the setting up the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on pesticide residues in and safety standards for soft drinks, fruit juices and other beverages. The JPC gave its report in February 2004, endorsing the findings of CSE on pesticides in carbonated beverages and recommending wide ranging reform in food safety for the country. The report of the parliamentarians has become an important milestone in building a new and more vibrant regulatory system to ensure that contamination in food and water is minimised and does not compromise human health. Narain's research has also helped to build a strong public opinion in favour of reform, particularly, regarding the contamination of groundwater, the drinking water source of millions of people across the country.

 

Climate Change: working for an effective and equitable regime

Narain began work on climate change in the early 1990. In 1991, she co-authored Global warming in an unequal world: A case of environmental colonialism, which played a critical role in establishing the principle of equity in the framework convention on climate change. Since then she has continued to work in building awareness and consensus about the need for an effective and equitable climate change agreement. She has researched and authored publications on different aspects of the climate regime – from aspects of negotiating positions to critiques of various trading mechanisms and options for mitigation and adaptation. In 2008-09, she served as a member of the Swedish government's high level commission on the need for adaptation and its links with development. 

 

Contact: 
Phone:+ 91-11-29955778 
E-mail: sunita@cseindia.org