We Don’t Need No Education

CLAUDE ALVARES TALKED TO SEE GOA ON A HOST OF ISSUES.

Claude Alvares wears many hats, all for the cause of a natural way of life that will keep the planet and its bounties safe for generations to come. If Goa is not to become a concrete jungle, it will be due to the efforts of people like Alvares. He is the director of the Goa Foundation, which The Times of India once described as the premier environmental monitoring group in Goa. Alvares is also a strong proponent of organic farming, and is the director of the Central Secretariat of the Organic Farming Association of India. Some of the other posts he holds are: member, Supreme Court Monitoring Committee on Hazardous Wastes; member, High Court Committee on Noise Pollution; working director, Green Goa Works (a non­profit firm – with renowned designer Wendell Rodricks as its chairman – involved in solid waste management); and editor, Other India Press.

Alvares is a rather staunch critic of the education system in the country. He believes that this system breeds “parasites”, while those who are not part of it are the ones that “keep the country going”. Exploring alternative methods of learning, Alvares is the coordinator of Multiversity, an Internet-based learning avenue.

Alvares is also a formidable author and editor on environmental issues. Some of the works that he has authored and edited are De­colonising History: Technology & Culture in India, China and the West – 1500 to the Present Day; Science, Development & Violence; Another Revolution Fails; Fish, Curry and Rice: A Citizens’ Report on the Goan Environment; The Organic Farming Resource Book; Multiversity; and the latest, Goa: Sweet Land of Mine (alongwith Reboni Saba), which is a severe indictment of the mining industry in Goa.

Alvares lives in Parra village, along with his wife, Norma Alvares, a Padma Shri holder and environmental lawyer, and three sons, Rahul, Sameer and Milind.

Excerpts from the interview:

Goa is in the throes of activism. This seems a very crucial stage – a fight between those who are all for unbridled development and those who want Goa to retain its idyllic charm. Is anyone winning the battle, how does it go from here?

I think at the moment the public is winning the battle, one can say this with confidence because on major issues like the Regional Plan, SEZ (Special Economic Zones), many large housing projects, even the opposition that is developing against the mining industry, all these are unprecedented. In terms of the mining industry, there has really been no great protest against it because of the industry’s policy of dividing villages and giving some benefits to some people in a village so that they will become a force in favour of the mining industry. But that’s also gone right now, and many of them are approaching courts. In the case of the Regional Plan, it was the first time in the country that a statutory plan had to be withdrawn by the government, it is unprecedented. Even in the case of the SEZs, in many places like Nandigram (West Bengal) people have had to die for the cancellation of a single SEZ whereas in the case of Goa,18 SEZs have been denotified.

There are several factors why activism is succeeding in Goa. Goa is first of all a very small place; you can’t have these types of agitations in, say, Maharashtra because you can’t get the people of Maharashtra all together on a particular issue. But in the case of Goa, we can get activists to move around, people from the south to attend meetings in the north and people from the north to attend meetings in the south, and people from the coast to attend meetings in the interior, and all this perhaps within one and a half hour of travel. The other thing is the political process itself; most of these things are done with some sort of approval from the government itself. The whole business of democratic politics in India today is that the government has to respond to the public, the government can’t say that it has been elected by the public and it will do what it wants. The government has to be sensitive to public opinion. For example, the Congress party would lose the whole of South Goa if it were nasty on SEZ because the entire church has been very much a part of the agitation against SEZ and against the Regional Plan.

You have long been a vehement opponent of the educational system in the country. What are your problems with this system, and how does your concept of “Multiversity” provide an alternative?

It’s rather foolish for me to even think in terms of doing anything about the organised schooling or college system. It has sort of run into a rut, and it is not going to recover, and it is going to get only worse for the kids. And my interest is the kids, how do we get kids to learn again. Right now, kids are being taken out of learning situations, they should be interacting with their parents, their Goan grandparents, their uncles, their aunties – all of them great learning institutions. There are various colleges, you can learn from the book there but you can’t learn from life, you can’t learn how to interact in a bank by staying in a class, you have got to go to a bank… you have got to go to a factory to see how things work; if a river is being polluted, you have got to go there, you have got to study that river, you have got to find out what is wrong with it. These are the millions of practical situations that are available, unfortunately the entire educational system has wrapped itself around in trying to follow this view that eventually if the children are taken out of this learning situation and brought into these rooms, they will be able to engage in the business of learning… that is not learning at all.

As for Multiversity, it is an Internet­-based learning centre, it is to enable people to reduce their dependence on formal learning institutions. We have no objection if somebody wants to go to school or college, we are not interested in spending our time and energy trying to prevent them from doing so, some students do enjoy school, I don’t know what type of a person enjoys school (laughs). But by and large, most people find school a bore or they find it terrifying or they find it very difficult to cope with. There are so many pressures now, and the educationists have ended up putting more and more burdens on the child, because they think that as so much more information is there, all of it must be put into the mind of the child. The whole approach is the classic bucket approach ­that the child is an empty bucket, so you keep on filling the bucket with all the stuff that you want and in so far as the bucket is filled up, the child is educated. This is nonsense! Information is not learning, information is not education, but we have got into that trap and we can’t seem to get out of it. So the best thing is to encourage children to reduce their dependence on school or college, and for them not to give studies very much importance. The learning pattern followed in schools is not going to be useful for the students either in life or even in getting a job. What we would like the kids to do is to spend more time in actual learning situations.

Now if somebody wants to be a mechanic, why does he have to wait for 12 to 14 years, why does he have to wait for certification – certification is only text­book knowledge, it has got no practical experience. If you want to be a good mechanic, start at the age of six, no problem, work in your uncle’s garage because you have got nimble fingers, and by the time you are 10 or 12, you will already be a very good mechanic, and by the time you are a little bit older, you will be absorbed by all these factory garages. If the kids get to do things that give them some joy, which matches their curiosity, expertise takes place. Why is it that we have got a class of people who are parasites and a class of people who keep this country going? For example, the people who produce your rice are people who are not necessarily educated or have gone to school, but they know how to work ploughs, they know how to work oxen, they know the fertility of fields, how to put in plants, how to raise plants, which something even the agriculture department may not know – if you take the director of agriculture and tell him to please go to the field today and plant, he will not know how to do it, he may be able to give instructions for somebody else to do it, but he will not be able to do it.

How successful have you been with the organic farming movement? What have been the stumbling blocks to its success?

The only stumbling block is the government’s commitment. But we have now reached a stage where organic farming is accepted as a method of farming. The government of India in many of its meetings with us has said that it is so convinced about organic farming that it is now committed to supply information to farmers about organic farming – in the same way that it used to cater to the needs of farmers doing chemical farming.

For the last 40 years, the government has been setting up a system for the promotion of chemical farming. In those years, if you wanted to farm organically, no bank would give you a loan, this was a bias. Now the government says that it is going to remove that bias and will make it equal, so we will have two parallel tracks – one for organic farming and another for chemical farming. The government won’t give up chemicals at all because it is convinced that chemicals are required. This is because the people who make the policies in agriculture are not farmers themselves, they are bureaucrats, they think in terms of very large numbers, they think that we have to get so many chemical fertilizers every year and this must be dumped into the soil some way or the other. And how do we make that possible, it is made possible by the business of subsidy. That’s the business of agriculture – how to find a subsidy; today there’s a subsidy of 100,000 crore rupees only on chemical fertilizers! This is complete nonsense, this has got no future. If you have an agriculture system devoted to this type of subsidy, there really is no future because ultimately, we don’t have that kind of money, we are not producing that kind of money, we are just printing more notes, that in itself is having an inflationary impact.

Our disappointment is that the government is not really putting in the urgent effort that’s required to promote organic farming, which it has been doing for chemical farming. So it’s an absurd situation today that people who produce food chemically, who produce food using pesticides – very toxic pesticides – and who are harming the soil and its communities, these people are being subsidised. As for the organic farmers who are farming by maintaining the integrity of their soil and producing good, nutritious food, they are not being helped; they are not being supported in any way. On the contrary, the organic farmers are being asked to go in for certification. So the paradoxical thing is that a fellow who is producing contaminated food doesn’t have to get his food certified, but the fellow who is producing good food, natural food, as nature produces it, they tell them to please certify so that it is proved that it’s been grown naturally. That’s an absurd situation!

One very good case is that India Today is starting a new magazine for awareness on public health issues, and they have asked me to do a column for them on how food items are being produced by farmers today, and what the impacts on health because of the heavy dependence on chemicals, and how one can identify organically grown food and where one can get it if one wants to. And the first piece that I submitted to them, they were shocked, they said that if this is the situation, it is going to shake people up altogether. As a person who has been in the organic farming movement for the last 20-25 years, I know that most things that are produced in the field today are being done with the use of the most toxic chemicals.

Does Goa completely do away with mining, or is there any way whereby both the economy and the ecology don’t suffer?

Let me put it in a very graphic way. The only illustration I can give you is of a poor person in a good state of health who wants some money, so what does he do, he sells his kidney, that is the classic method today in India for people to get 50,000 to one lakh in ready cash; it’s not something he will do in normal circumstances, it looks as though there are some people who are benefiting, somebody gets a kidney, there’s a hospital, there are doctors, there’s infrastructure, there are medicines sold so that the kidney operation can go through and the person who is getting the kidney can be levied a hefty fee of three to five lakh rupees, mostly he will be a foreigner or a Gulf person. All of this looks as though the economy is benefiting, because from a simple kidney, which was only operating in somebody’s body, doing nothing, now a lot of money has been created, and some people have been employed.

That’s what I tell people when I try to explain mining to them, I ask them to look at it from this point of view. There’s iron ore in the ground, now this is not something that has been put there by God or by nature because they didn’t know what to do with it. An ore is a very valuable filter of water, and the tribals in Goa know this because they have situated their paddy fields very close to many of these places, which are now going in for mining. So that’s the kind of ore that’s being exported, it is as if Goa’s body is donating this purificatory element to somebody else. And that too to a country like China, who is India’s rival and competitor. We are selling ore to them so that they make weapons out of it, which at the end of the day, may be trained on India.

Goan politics has always been unstable. Is the problem with Goan politicians? Do you think there’s any silver lining there?

No, not at all. But then, we are not interested in that kind of politics. That’s why we are on the outside. When the villagers seek justice and get together, their power is such that no politician or even the Supreme Court can do anything against them. Without public sanction, nothing will move, and the politician has to understand that.

There’s this popular opinion that environmentalists are always there to oppose, they are never constructive, and all these NGOs are finally there for the money. What’s your take on that?

Goan NGOs are not funded, all of them work free of cost. It’s all voluntary. We have no air-conditioned offices unlike what some people allege; these people themselves can’t do without air conditioners. These are all wild comments. We are involved in positive work. Like in the case of the garbage dumping site in Sonsoddo. For an amount of 17 lakh rupees spread over one and a half years, the Goa Foundation cleaned up the 40 ­year-old site, detoxified it, erected a wall, brought water to the site, created a composting yard, prevented the entry of stray animals and finally eliminated the fires. But today, even with 7.84 crore rupees of public money actually approved by the government for the Sonsoddo project, the site remains as it is, with some superficial work carried out by the contractor. Again, it was due to the efforts of the NGOs that Panjim city got 80 composting pits. We only oppose destruction, we do not oppose development.

You have ruffled many big feathers in your battles to save the environment and preserve ecology. What’s your experience with intimidation?

In my 25 years of activism, there has been really no intimidation, instead they – ­the people who flout norms – get intimidated. Yes, there have been one or two threatening phone calls from desperate individuals. See, when it comes to facing judicial proceedings – as per the right that the Constitution has given us – all become equal. All our opponents know that the Goa Foundation has done considerable work in the last 25 years, and it’s been work without any blemish. No one has ever accused us that we approached them for money. Actually, our opponents give us grudging respect.

What are your thoughts on Goan tourism?

Goan tourism is in a bad shape. Some norms should have been put in place at the first instance itself. There’s too much of ripping off, from the taxi drivers to the cops. Then there’s the garbage situation, the noise pollution, the drug racket… The cops are still harassing tourists, sometimes even by planting drugs on them. This is not what the tourists come here for, one of the things they come here is because the Goans are always ready for a talk; to strike up a conversation comes naturally to the Goans. I want Goan tourism to be a convivial industry. So a time will come when things hit real rock-bottom, then the industry will get together and take some positive steps. That’s always what happens here, we will wait for a crisis and then take steps for a better situation.

Any message to the younger generation…

They will have to act soon, otherwise there will be no next generation because of the sea-level rise (in some 10 years, 10 percent of Goa will be under water) and global warming. The young will have to get into action fast, instead of having Bacardi breezers!

A book that everyone should read…

Mahabharata by Chaturvedi Badrinath, published by Orient Longman. It’ s a modem version of the epic and talks about people under pressure chasing money.

Favourite place in Goa…

My village Parra, where my friends are, its roads, its fields…

Inspiration…

Gandhi is a very big influence.

Motivation technique on a bad day…

A good dose of Pranayama does the trick. Some ten minutes of meditation, and you can overcome anything, and it’s free! Mornings are the best time for meditation.

Life’s Motto…

The Geeta says, do whatever you are supposed to do, forget about the rewards…

The coconut tree…

If only all of us could be like the coconut tree.. .

Goan monsoon…

It’s the rejuvenation of Goa. All the violence done to nature gets concealed by the rains. It’s a sign that one cycle has been completed, and the new one has begun. Oh to hear frogs croaking!

(Originally published in See Goa. vol.3, No.1. July 2008: www.readseegoa.com)