Little Cuba: India's boxing Mecca

How a dedicated boxing coach in a small town outside New Delhi boosted India's chances of an Olympic medal.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - July 20, 2012)

BHIWANI, Haryana — In a bleak desert town three hours from New Delhi, India's future boxing champions square off for a Friday sparring session.

To make the best use of the club's limited space, three pairs of fighters touch gloves in each of the club's two rings. And at the end of each three-minute round, Coach Jagdish Singh turns his attention to a crowd of 11- to 15-year-old boys, watching in rapt attention from the floor in front of the rings.

“Shadow!” Jagdish calls out, following a shrill blast of a police whistle that signals the youngsters to begin shadowboxing.

Since Jagdish started the Bhiwani Boxing Club (or BBC, as he likes to call it) in 2003, he has flagged off a revolution in the sport. Training thousands of boxers in this dusty Haryana backwater — a farming community with only around 200,000 residents — he's taken home 150 medals in international competitions.

BBC has produced nine out of India's 16 Olympic qualifiers since 2004. And in a sport where coaches once despaired that India had no chance at the victors' podium, Jagdish sent three boxers to the quarter finals in Beijing, with his longtime student Vijender Singh bringing home India's first medal (a bronze) in the 75 kilogram weight class.

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This year, Jagdish has two boxers in the Olympics (there are three others from the state of Haryana) including Vijender and Vikas Krishnan (69 kg). But the coach says two more of his male fighters and one female boxer from his club, who had all won international accolades, might have qualified as well if Indian amateur boxing authority had given them the chance.

Moreover, it's part of his legacy that India is sending its largest boxing team ever to London — seven men and one woman. And he deserves a large part of the credit for the fact that all of them believe they can bring home a medal, a feat that he swore to achieve way back in 2000 at a meeting where none of the country's other coaches were willing to claim India had a chance.

“I know of very few coaches in India who are really dedicated. ... But when it comes to Jagdish, there was something which you could call an obsession,” said Shamya Dasgupta, the author of a new book about Indian boxing called “Bhiwani Junction.”

“When you look at the cream of Indian boxing ... they are all from Bhiwani, or they have all trained in Bhiwani,” Dasgupta said.

Today known as “Little Cuba,” a reference to that country's dominance of Olympic boxing, Bhiwani, like its famous coach, is obsessed with the sweet science.

“Since the last 16 years, I have had no personal life,” says Jagdish, who received India's highest honor for a coach, the Dronacharya Award, in 2007. Providing room and board for 40 to 50 boxers at a time, keeping them out of trouble and sending them to school, he makes sure BBC is open seven days a week, 365 days a year.

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“Out of 24 hours, I go to my house sometimes 10 o'clock, sometimes nine o'clock, and early in the morning, five o'clock [I come to the gym],” Jagdish says. “I never go on leave. I never go on any tour. I never go to any marriage or family function. I am totally cut off from my family life, from my relatives. My main motivation, my main work is boxing, boxing, boxing.”

Along with 70 elite prospects, 40 of whom live in a dormitory on the premises, Jagdish says walk-ins from the town and nearby villages are common — with around 100 on-and-off pupils from Beijing Olympic hero Vijender's neighborhood alone.

Others, like 16-year-old Prince Rana, have traveled from as far away as Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh — some 300 miles, across three state borders — to train with the best.

“This training is world class. The best in all India. In Gwalior there is no boxing,” said Rana, whose parents pay around $100 a month for him to live and train at BBC. “In 2008, I saw Vijender Singh fight, and I learned that he'd practiced here for eight years. That's why I came here.”

It's a remarkable change for Indian sports, which until recently, apart from cricket, had not inspired much enthusiasm or generated much success.

Since it sent its first athlete to the Olympics in 1900, the country has won just 20 medals — five fewer than little Japan won in 2008 alone. Not long ago, parents across the nation discouraged children from wasting time on sports instead of studying. And those athletes who did manage to excel often had to drum up their own sponsors to fund their training.

Now, however, thanks in large part to Jagdish and Beijing bronze medalist Vijender — whose Olympic medal and moviestar looks have landed modeling gigs, commercials and reality TV appearances — the lower-middle-class families of Haryana have begun to believe in boxing. And it's not just about putting in a few years to earn a sinecure as a constable in the state police or a ticket agent with the Indian Railways.

These days, like many of the 81 athletes competing for India at the London games, Jagdish's fighters are aiming for gold.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120717/boxing-sports-olympics-london-2012-bhiwani-boxing-club

India: Food rots as people starve

By Jason Overdorf

(GlobalPost - July 16, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — Never mind that a fifth of India's population remains undernourished and some 3,000 children die each day from hunger-related causes. By all appearances, India, or at least the Indian government, has too much food.

Last week, after the revelation that millions of tons of improperly stored grain would be ruined by monsoon rains, India lifted a four-year ban on wheat exports and cleared the way for the state-owned Food Corporation of India to send 2 million tons overseas. It also approved the release some 8 million tons of grain into the domestic market.

Shipping grain abroad while millions starve in India has elicited a strong response from critics.

“This is unpardonable. I see no reason why it is happening,” said farm policy analyst Devinder Sharma. “It is because there is no political will to feed the hungry that people are dying, not because there is no food.”

On paper, that hardly seems to be the case. India spends about $14 billion a year, or 1 percent of its gross domestic product, to provide subsidized grain to a third of its people — at least theoretically. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's administration is considering a move to enshrine the “right to food” in law and double the number of people eligible for subsidized grain.

But everywhere except on paper, the system can seem irretrievably broken. And India's mounting deficit has caused many right-leaning economists to question whether now is the time to spend even more money on a broken system.

Hunger, malnutrition and starvation are different, though related problems, so more calories isn't a cure all – particularly if all those calories come from wheat and rice. But even when everyone knows that people are dying because they have nothing to eat, the government appears incapable of making the welfare system function at its most basic level.

“The shocking thing is that many of these [starvation] cases have been followed up on by the media, many times,” said Ashwin Parulkar, a researcher with the New Delhi-based Center for Equity Studies who recently investigated the government response to starvation cases. “But the simple administrative tasks that are supposed to prevent these things aren't even enforced when these calamities have already happened.”

In rural Jharkhand, for instance, a woman whose husband starved to death two years ago was still waiting for a card certifying her as eligible for subsidized grain. When Parulkar confronted local administrators, they told him they would get her the card. They even gave him a specific date. But even after Parulkar published his findings in a thoughtful, six-part series for the Wall Street Journal's India Real Time blog, the woman still hasn't received it.

They have "no shame in admitting it hasn't been done,” Parulkar said. And "no shame in promising something they know they're not going to do.”

For several years now, India has complained of a so-called “paradox of plenty.” As higher yields have produced more and more rice and wheat, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) has snapped up ever larger amounts to prop up prices for the country's millions of farmers — until all the warehouses were full, and towering stacks of wheat and rice had to be abandoned to rot under the open skies.

But as much as the talk has centered around building more warehouses, or allowing retailers like Walmart into the market to whip the supply chain into shape, the problem was never about plenty, and it was never about storage. The problem was, and is, distribution.

India's food subsidy system was designed for two purposes. FCI buys grain at a so-called “minimum support price” to protect farmers from a crash when the monsoon delivers a bumper harvest. And it is supposed to sell or give away that grain at below market rates to protect the poor from starvation.

But no matter how much grain the government buys, no matter how many tons lie rotting in its possession, and no matter how many people go to bed hungry each night, the amount of grain it disperses to the poor never gets much larger.

“The refusal of the government to let go of these food grains is at the heart of [the problem],” said Biraj Patnaik, principal adviser to the Supreme Court on the proposed right to food law.

Since 2003, the government's “buffer stock” of food grains has rarely been less than double the prescribed norm, according to Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser to the prime minister, writing in Economic & Political Weekly. Over the same period, as Indians continued to go hungry, wheat prices in India soared. They rose as much as 30 percent higher than international rates in the summer of 2010. Meanwhile time after time the FCI sold off its so-called excess on the international market for less than the price it could have earned at home.

“I see no justification for a hungry nation to be exporting food grains,” said Sharma. “How can you be so criminal in your thought process?”

The usual explanation is corruption. It's not that the government doesn't want to release its stockpiled grain to the poor, the argument runs. But there's little point to the exercise, since as much as 18 percent of rice and 67 percent of wheat intended for the poor is diverted before it reaches the target, according to a frequently cited study. And if that's not bad enough, corrupt traders sell a healthy portion of that diverted grain right back to the FCI for a minimum price — scamming the government into paying a subsidy for the same grain again and again.

But that's not the whole story. Theft of the grain intended for the poor has dropped significantly, according to economist Reetika Khera. And the most marked improvements have been achieved in states that have simultaneously reduced grain prices and expanded the system's coverage, Khera argues, citing moves by Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu to offer rice to everyone at the subsidized price of one rupee per kilogram. In other words, the closer the system comes to a universal subsidy for all, the better it seems to work.

Moreover, corruption isn't the only reason India stockpiles food while its people starve. India's economic liberalization, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), have also played a role, according to Jawaharlal Nehru University's Jayati Ghosh.

Since 1991, when, as finance minister, Manmohan Singh initiated the dismantling of India's planned economy, India has dramatically reduced public investments in agriculture and rural areas. Meanwhile, the WTO-related removal of trade restrictions forced Indian farmers to compete with “highly subsidized large producers in the developed countries, whose average level of subsidy amounted to many times the total domestic cost of production for many crops,” Ghosh wrote in a 2005 background paper for the United Nations' Human Development Report. The result was a “very pronounced” reduction in food grain consumption.

India's economic liberalization also resulted in deep cuts to the public distribution system. On the insistence of the World Bank (which had backed the loans that bailed India out of a financial crisis in 1991), the government scrapped its near universal food grain subsidy in favor of a system that targeted only below poverty line families in 1997.

Since then, millions of people have slipped through the cracks, unable to secure ration cards testifying to their poverty. The effort to separate the absolutely destitute from the very poor has added new complexity to a system already plagued by bureaucratic inefficiency, and, presumably, offered new opportunities for graft.

But the biggest embarrassment has been the government's effort to reduce costs by charging more for grain sold to above-poverty-line families. That effort has backfired miserably.

Between 1997 and 2000, FCI increased grain prices by 80 percent for below-poverty-line families, while the rates that above-poverty-line families had to pay doubled. But the prices were too high for the poor to afford, so the only result was that people bought less grain — and ate less. Instead of selling grain at a loss, the government wasn't selling it at all. The stocks mounted, increasing from some 18 million tons in 1998 to more than 50 million tons in 2003.

Over the past decade, the amount of grain purchased by below-poverty-line families has increased — mostly because states like Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have expanded coverage and offered additional subsidies over and above the FCI discount. But offtake at the above poverty line rate has remained low, even as market rates soared and states clamored for more, simply because the central government refused to sell, said Ghosh.

As a result, at last count the government had 82 million tons of grain in hand, hoarded for the emergency it never acknowledges has already arrived.

A cynic might well suggest that no real change is likely anytime soon. The proposed national food security bill aims to make the food distribution system work better by adding new enforcement mechanisms, as well as setting up soup kitchens, school meal programs and direct cash transfers to complement the existing subsidies.

But despite all the furor about its cost, the new and improved targeted system still relies on the broken method of trying to identify the poor – whose numbers rise and fall much more rapidly than the government can conduct economic surveys. It ignores evidence from the states that suggests universal subsidies work best.

And even after the expansion it will still cover a lot fewer people than the near universal food program India had until the 1990s.

India: Video Volunteers highlight fate of 'untouchables'

Activists from India's marginalized groups are becoming community journalists armed with handheld cameras.

By Jason Overdorf

(GlobalPost - July 1, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — A crowd shouts in panic as men pull a limp sanitation worker out of the burbling sewer. He does not regain consciousness, and the worker's arms flop loosely as a paramedic rolls him over and pumps his chest in a vain effort to resuscitate him.

A second man is pulled from the manhole and roughly hosed down before anyone will help him. The casual brutality of the rescue effort is irrelevant. Both sewer workers are already dead — killed by an “untouchable” job.

The scene is a gruesome one, but not uncommon. Like nearly all of India's sewer workers, these men were Dalits, or members of the group once known as “untouchable.” Untouchables were dubbed such because it was thought their bad karma condemned them to filthy jobs. Mere contact with them was thought to pollute to the soul.

Discriminating against Dalits has been ruled officially illegal. But the 2,000-year-old prejudice quietly continues, with Dalits often confined to their historical occupations, as well as barred from accessing community wells and temples. In extreme cases, they are paraded naked, forced to eat excrement or murdered when they object.

What is more remarkable than the nature of the disturbing scene described above is the fact that it was captured on video.

If people are confronted with the harsh realities of Dalit life, will they fight for change? A relatively new nonprofit called Video Volunteers is hoping so.

By training activists from India's marginalized groups to become community journalists, and arming them with cameras to document various abuses, they are hoping to push for more equality among India's notoriously striated society and shame authorities into action.

In April, Video Volunteers launched an innovative documentary project called “Article 17,” after the law that rendered the practice of untouchability technically illegal in 1949 The project aims to document offenses, mobilize communities and generative more nuanced coverage in the mainstream media.

So far, Video Volunteers correspondents have produced 22 two- to three-minute spots documenting the continued practice of untouchability across India, adding to a library of more than 500 short films made by the outfit's 100-odd full-time community producers.

Television networks CNN/IBN and NewsX have broadcast some of the videos on TV, while mainstream media outlets like Tehelka magazine and Youth Ki Awaaz have featured the videos on their websites. And in two months, the Article 17 campaign has generated more than 1,000 signatures for a petition urging the National Commission for Scheduled Castes to begin prosecuting offenses.

Not surprisingly, though, so far they've gotten the usual bureaucratic runaround, as a funny YouTube video demonstrates. And activists who are familiar with the workings of the system say that's about all they should expect.

“The effect will be limited,” said Anoop Kumar, national coordinator of the Insight Foundation, another organization that fights for Dalit rights. “I have been dealing with the Scheduled Caste commission [the government body designated to protect Dalits] for the past decade. They always say they are serious. But they don't have the political will to take action.”

That said, Video Volunteers docs have beaten the odds in the past, and their activist-journalists aren't banking on the bureaucrats to make an impact. With the knowledge that documenting abuses is itself empowering, correspondents arrange community screenings, spread their stories by cell phone and use them to confront local authorities.

In many previous campaigns, they've made a difference. The organization's community journalists have produced more than 500 videos on topics ranging from child marriage to sexual harrassment to government corruption since it was founded by American Jessica Mayberry in 2003. Through outdoor screenings in slums and villages, they've reached an audience of more than 300,000 viewers. And more than 17,000 villagers and slumdwellers been spurred to action, helping more than 600,000 people, according to the non-profit's internal records.

For instance, a Video Volunteers film on India's Right to Information law encouraged slum dwellers in Mumbai to file a request for information about the amount of money spent on garbage collection in their area — an act that itself was enough to ensure a speedy cleanup. Another video documenting evidence that a government school was demanding bribes from parents in addition to the official fees resulted in the removal of the erring headmaster.

A village hotel was forced to rebuild its sewage system so that it didn’t empty into the village’s drinking water. The government re-opened a water treatment
plant and brought clean water to 3,000 people of one district after Video Volunteers' filmmakers exposed a high level of fluorine content in the local water supply.

“Just saying untouchability is bad, or these people should be punished, is not going to help, because this problem is huge,” said the Insight Foundation's Kumar. “But once a Dalit becomes a little assertive politically, he is able to fight it back.”

In the video of the men who died in the sewer beneath the bustling streets of Ludhiana, Punjab, the next man down the manhole tells a Video Volunteers community correspondent.

“I feel bad, but I have to do this dirty work to earn a living. What can I do? I have to educate my children.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120627/india-video-volunteers-film-untouchables