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	India"s untouchables seek social progress in Global Job Market by Emily Wax Washington Post India - Pune   Sept. 2007   As a Dalit, Pratibha Valmik Kamble is part of the poorest and most ostracized community in this subcontinent"s ancient caste system, a group of people so shunned that they are still known as untouchables. Her mother is a maid, her father a day laborer.Yet here in this prospering city, Kamble, 24, was recently applying to an Indian firm called Temp Solutions to go to Philadelphia for a well-paid social service job there.   During the interview, she twisted her hands nervously in her lap, knowing that if she landed the position, she would not only make more money than both of her parents combined, she would enhance their social status, and her own.   India has long had an affirmative action program for federal government jobs, setting aside 23 percent of positions for the most oppressed castes. Now activists are campaigning to open the private sector to them as well, whether the employer is Indian or multinational. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently said he favors that goal.   So does Temp Solutions co-owner Michael Thevar, himself a member of a low-ranking caste. He gave Kamble the job.   "I"m so proud of you," he told her after delivering the good news. "I know so well how much you struggled. That"s why I am that much more impressed."   Recruiting drives aimed at hiring members of India"s unprivileged castes, who make up 70 percent of the population, remain rare in the subcontinent"s booming service sector. But as India hurtles into world markets, such hiring has touched off a larger debate over the country"s 3,000-year-old caste system.   In much of India, the system organizes people into a rigid social order by accident of birth, determining everything from professions to marriage partners.   While the caste system is outlawed by the constitution, low-caste Indians still experience severe discrimination. Dalits are regarded as so low that they are not even part of the system. To this day, they are not allowed to enter many Hindu temples or to drink water from sources used by higher castes.   So far only two major companies -- Bharti Enterprises and Infosys -- have announced they would set aside jobs for Dalits and other oppressed castes.   Ramesh Bajpai, executive director of the New Delhi-based American Chamber of Commerce in India, said the issue of affirmative action for oppressed castes has not been raised among his members -- an indication, some Indian workers contend, that many U.S. companies are not fully aware of the caste system and its complex legacy of discrimination.   An estimated 86 percent of technology workers at multinationals and large Indian outsourcing firms come from upper castes or wealthy middle castes, according to a study released in August 2006 by the government and activist groups.   Michael Thevar, who recruits lower-caste workers for temporary jobs, says "Caste should not be globalized, and as India rises economically, that is the real fear".   Thevar and Dalit activists have even lobbied the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus, with whom they see common cause and a shared experience in discrimination.   Congress has taken notice, and last month passed a resolution calling for the United States to work with India to address the problem of untouchability by "encouraging U.S. businesses and other U.S. organizations working in India to take every possible measure to ensure Dalits are included and are not discriminated against in their programming."   "It is now time for this Congress to speak out about this ancient and particularly abhorrent form of persecution and segregation", Rep. Trent Franks said during a speech last spring on the House floor. Franks went on to call Dalits "one of the most oppressed peoples on Earth."   In 2006 a study found that public health workers refuse to visit 33 percent of Dalit villages, while mail is not delivered to the homes of 24 percent of Dalits.   The reason for the neglect, the study said, is that some in the upper castes believe lower-caste people are dirty and lack dignity in their labor as latrine cleaners, rickshaw drivers, butchers, herders and barbers.   The debate on affirmative action in India is similar to the one in the United States in terms of discrimination and ways to end it. But in India, those who experience discrimination, especially in rural areas, are the majority and are ruled by an elite.   The issue is complicated by India"s turbulent history of race, class and caste. Centuries-old customs of arranged marriages and inherited professions perpetuate caste divisions, which are further reinforced by some interpretations of Hinduism, India"s dominant religion, which sanctions the caste system.   The country"s education system also hardens caste. Lower castes largely attend public schools, which teach local languages, while private schools attended by upper castes teach English -- the most important criterion to be hired at a call center, where young employees spend their nights helping customers phoning from the United States.   Opponents of affirmative action argue that government set-asides should have lasted only 10 years after independence in 1947, not the six decades that they have. In the workplace and in colleges, affirmative action programs breed resentment, the critics say, because they dilute merit-based hiring that should, in theory, reward the most qualified job candidates, regardless of caste.   Still, affirmative action has helped pull tens of thousands of people out of abject poverty and into universities and government jobs, while creating a small Dalit middle class that many hope will expand along with India"s economy. It also has given rise to a new kind of struggle, as other low-ranking groups known here as the "backward castes" protest that their government designation isn"t "low-caste enough" to make them eligible for job set-asides.   But inside the interview room, the young professionals applying for jobs with Temp Solutions said they would have never gotten an education without set-asides. The interviews were held at the Manuski Center, part of a Buddhist monastery. Hundreds of thousands of Dalits have converted to Buddhism in an attempt to escape the caste system.   Sitting in a circle as they waited to hear whether they would get jobs, Kamble and the other students talked about the often harrowing discrimination they faced.   "I knew there was hatred in the world and in India, when as a child I watched some upper castes refuse to sell my mother lentils and rice in the nicer part of the market because we were "dirty" and from a backward caste," said Vivek Kumar Katara, 22, who has a master"s degree in social work focusing on helping the mentally ill. Without quotas, Katara said, "I honestly don"t know if professors would have even let me sit in the same class as upper castes."
	Energy poverty and political vision by Reuters / OpenDemocracy Spain   12 Sep 2007   Dirty energy threatens health of 2 billion, by Ben Hirschler. (Reuters)   The health of about 2 billion of the world''s poor is being damaged because they lack access to clean energy, like electricity, and face exposure to smoke from open fires, scientists said on Thursday.   Dangerous levels of indoor air pollutants from badly ventilated cooking fires are a common hazard, while lack of electricity deprives many of the benefits of refrigeration.   Paul Wilkinson of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said the world''s richest populations use up to 20 times more energy per head than those from poor countries, posing a challenge to improve energy supply without pollution.   Writing in the Lancet medical journal, Wilkinson and colleagues estimated 2.4 billion people worldwide were exposed to pollution from inefficient burning of solid fuels like wood, coal and dried cow dung.   This causes around 1.6 million premature deaths each year -- roughly double the level of deaths from air pollution in cities -- and many more non-fatal cases of respiratory diseases. At the same time, around 1.6 billion people worldwide have no electricity.   "Paradoxically, the poor are using much less energy but they are getting all the adverse effects," Wilkinson said in an interview.   "We in the more developed countries have access to clean energy and are using much more of it and are contributing to the global problem of climate change, where the main adverse effects are likely to fall, once again, on lower-income countries."   Global warming could trigger a range of health problems including more extreme heatwaves, increases in water-borne and insect-borne diseases, and threats to food supplies.   Lancet editor Richard Horton said the research showed that the current debate on climate change and new energy sources was unbalanced and too narrow. "It neglects a far larger set of issues focussed on energy and health," he said.   4 - 09 - 2007   Energy poverty and political vision, by Alejandro Litovsky. (OpenDemocracy)   Around 2.64 billion people, 40% of the world"s population, lack modern fuels for cooking and heating. 1.6 billion have no access to electricity, three-quarters of them living in rural areas.   As decision-makers in Europe and north America wonder how to reduce energy consumption, massive regions of the developing world remain literally in the dark.   Populations in the energy-poverty trap - covering vast areas of south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa - are nowhere likely to influence the accountability of the energy policies of their governments.   At a high-level workshop on Energy and Democratic Leadership: Promoting Access to Energy for Poverty Reduction in Santander, Spain on 20-21 August 2007, the debate on this global energy poverty took a welcome turn towards politics.   The event brought together an unusual crowd to discuss the solutions: energy-poverty experts from international agencies, civil society and energy businesses were joined by former political leaders (Mary Robinson, Jimmy Carter, Sadig al-Mahdi) to attempt to put the pieces of the puzzle together.   From Nepal to Uganda, Guatemala to India, hundreds of examples demonstrate the potential of energy innovations to overcome energy poverty - a mix of wind, solar, small hydro, biomass power, or technology such as LED lighting.   These can empower the poor to develop productive small and medium enterprises, to gain autonomy and independence in the generation of energy. Off-grid projects are increasingly seen in areas where publicly regulated electricity grids have found it unviable to reach.   These initiatives can deliver real change on the ground, enabling citizens to access refrigerated medicines, light schoolrooms, power water pumps and use mobile telecommunications - but only if they are tailored to local needs and delivered in sustainable ways.   Efforts to bridge the energy gap are often fragmented internationally. Scaling up successful projects remains the biggest challenge. As Kamal Rijal, energy-policy advisor to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), explained in Santander: "Scaling up pilot projects requires political commitment. Reducing the risk to investors and strengthening the institutional capacity is the key to achieve scale."   One illustration of the bottlenecks in the system is the African Rural Energy Enterprise Development (Areed). Areed offers rural energy entrepreneurs in countries like Mali, Ghana, Tanzania, Senegal and Zambia a combination of enterprise-development services and start-up financing; but it is finding that governments are not fully supporting these enterprise approaches because they are not convinced these are in line with their political interests or their developmental priorities.   Institutional barriers to the setting up of new renewable-energy enterprises currently prevail; their competitiveness largely depends on effective regulatory frameworks and government policy. Yet renewable energy enterprises can be very competitive.   Investment conditions for renewable energies are being improved through innovative approaches like the Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative (Sefi), which show that public-private partnerships and mobilising investors can improve the investment environment considerably. International donors, from the European Union to the UNDP are doing innovative work. The World Bank has set a target to supply 250 million Africans with clean-energy lighting by 2030.   But these worthy initiatives are fragmented pieces of the larger vision which is currently lacking. Inter-agency coordination needs to improve to build synergies. Where attempts in this direction have been made, the challenge becomes to translate national and regional political consensus into long-term, sustainable investment programmes.   The smart-government factor   Nigeria, a country with vast oil and gas reserves, is facing an energy crisis. The domestic energy sector of the world"s eighth largest exporter of oil is ailing, with 70% of citizens in the dependent on forest resources to meet their domestic energy needs. In August 2007, the new president, Umaru Musa Yar"Adua, declared an emergency in the energy sector and called, not surprisingly, for a new energy vision.   To fight energy poverty, democratic leaders need to improve the link between the revenue management of natural resources, investment in sustainable technology and the provision of energy solutions for the poor.   Government leaders can be visionaries and promote the uptake of renewable energy sources. For example, Algeria aims to tap its solar thermal resources to export solar energy to Europe. The Algerian government created New Energy Algeria (Neal) in 2002 to help develop its renewable resources. Neal has inaugurated the construction of a hybrid solar thermal power plant that is expected to generate 150 megawatts by 2010 and up to 6,000 megawatts by 2020.   The thermal component is not expected to be economically competitive for the next ten years, but this hasn"t dissuaded the Algerians from pursuing their plans. "Our potential in thermal solar power" says Tewfik Hasni, Neal"s managing director, "is four times the world"s energy consumption so you can have all the ambitions you want with that..." South Korea"s $170 million investment to build both the world"s biggest solar plant together with the largest tidal power plant is part of another focused effort to take renewable energy seriously in a national strategy.   The democratic challenge   Governments need to look for strong partners to deliver change on the ground, and here the private sector can be part of the solution. Companies have become interested in the 4 billion low-income people in the world who constitute the base of the economic pyramid. Their behaviour as consumers and aggregate purchasing power is now an incentive for business to join the fight against poverty, and an interest of companies to joint multi-stakeholder alliances.   The total "base of the pyramid" household energy market in Africa, Asia, eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean has been estimated by the World Resources Institute to be $433 billion dollars. International companies, providing products and services in energy, home appliances and mobile communications, are innovating business models targeted at those at the pyramid"s base.   However, participants at the Santander meeting insisted that a positive contribution of the private sector to development also depends on the capacity and willingness of democratic leaders in at least four areas.   First, they must create economic incentives for innovation - e.g. through targeted public subsidies - that benefit local entrepreneurs. Democratic leaders will face the difficult task of re-establishing energy-policy priorities, manage established interests, and an energy culture of policy-makers not used to thinking in terms of the decentralisation of energy generation.   Second, they must regard a vibrant private sector as an opportunity to improve the skills and capacities of the poor. Technologies that enable poor people"s independence - for example, through the use of decentralised energy generation with renewable energies - must be prioritised in electrification plans, coupled with the promotion of small enterprises.   Third, public-private partnerships are likely to offer an attractive option for governments to improve their capacity while leveraging private capital and knowledge. Democratic leaders must ensure that partnerships have a strong focus on their own good governance and on capacity-building for the poor, so that private interests do not dominate over public goals. Fourth, a sustainable contribution from the private sector will depend on a framework of good governance of the energy sector, one that can guarantee the rule of law, transparent accounts and decision-making, and a fight against corruption.   Infrastructure has increasingly been delivered through public-private partnerships over the past decade; but as Ricardo Lagos (Chile"s former president, and current United Nations special envoy for climate change) argued in Santander, governments must lead and not relinquish their responsibility in these initiatives: "This is a political discussion... the role of governments remains essential even if it needs to work with the private sector."   A new political leadership based on a collaborative ethos   The delivery of affordable, reliable and sustainable power to citizens is one of the key challenges of the 21st century. Yet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) fail to address the topic explicitly and many developing countries have poorly formulated national energy strategies in relation to achieving the MDGs. Worldwide, no sector is more fragmented than energy.   Strong political leadership is imperative for a robust energy vision that can reduce energy poverty around the world. Strategies need to address various fronts: regulation, gender policies, public-private cooperation, differences between urban and rural populations and service providers, the choice of technologies and financing schemes based on the people"s ability to pay.   At the local level, projects need to be sensitised to community demand and prospects for their associated economic productivity. Economic incentives to sustain small-and medium-energy enterprises are likely to offer a pathway for local ownership of the plans and projects.   Identifying and understanding energy solutions requires stakeholders to come together - both on a high, transnational level and in country-specific contexts - to discuss and commit to a common policy vision and strategy to address energy poverty.   As Mary Robinson, Ireland"s former president and head of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, told the Club of Madrid meeting: "We need to help facilitate multi-stakeholder partnerships in developing countries to link the bottom and the top - governments and investors to communities and social entrepreneurs."   The single most important message of the Santander workshop is that democratic leaders need a stronger and more coherent vision to address energy poverty. By bringing the different players to the table, political leaders can benefit from opportunities available to them to scale up current approaches. At the global level there is also a need for vision and a coherent approach on how to overcome energy poverty.   A collaborative framework is needed so that global actors can get involved with national and regional collaborative processes in a synchronised way. This collaborative framework can be a political roadmap to intensify efforts to create a new energy paradigm as a crucial means of eradicating poverty worldwide.   * Alejandro Litovsky"s article reflects on the workshop,on Energy and Democratic Leadership: Promoting Access to Energy for Poverty Reduction, held in Santander, Spain on 20-21 August 2007. Alejandro Litovsky is senior advisor at AccountAbility. Visit the related web page
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