Out of the ordinary

Longing to return to a free land

Rahul Chandran , rahul.c@livemint.com

New Delhi, 7th April 2012

Ask Tenzin Chemi what her favourite Indian food is and she will say rava idli. Which is not unusual. After all, a lot of people in this part of the world like the steamed cakes made of broken wheat.

Except that Chemi is a 22-year-old Tibetan whose grandfather Tashi Phuntsok and his family trekked more than 1,000km and sought refuge in India in 1959, a few months after Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to this country.

Chemi lives with her parents, grandfather and two brothers in Bylakuppe, a small, largely agricultural settlement, about 9km from the nearest town Kushalnagar, a wayside stop for tourists on their way to Coorg. For a Tibetan colony, the campsites are in an entirely incongruous setting, far from the mountains of the Himalayan range. There isn’t a hill in sight.

Following a failed 1959 uprising against China, the Dalai Lama sought refuge in India and has since lived in exile in Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh. According to the Central Tibetan Administration, Tibet’s government-in-exile based in India, 94,203 Tibetans live in India, of the total 127,435 who live outside Tibet.

Chemi’s grandfather, 77-year-old Phuntsok, left his village in south-eastern Tibet in 1959. He was 25 at the time. He chose to come to India because the Dalai Lama had already been given refuge in the country, he says.

By many accounts, India gave refuge to the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader and his compatriots for a mix of reasons. For one, India was the birthplace of Buddhism.

“It is not clear what the Indian consideration was (in allowing Tibetans into India), but India (in 1959) had about two million Pakistani refugees, so accepting Tibetans was not an abrupt policy change,” said Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. “Nehru shared the dais with the Dalai Lama at Sarnath (in Uttar Pradesh), so one of the reasons was religious, but there were other reasons too, including strategic ones.”

Phuntsok walked through Bhutan into Assam to take refuge in a small town called Missamari, where he stayed in tents with other Tibetan exiles. The Indian government, he says, provided them free food.

The Tibetans did not want anything for free, Phuntsok says, which is how he found himself as part of a road construction team for the Central Public Works Department in Dalhousie, Himachal Pradesh. After six months there, he was taken on a special train to Bylakuppe, then a little-known area about 230km from Bangalore, where then Karnataka chief minister S. Nijalingappa offered about 3,000 acres for the Tibetans to settle on.

Bylakuppe is now a bustling town with about 16,000 Tibetans living in four camps, the local resettlement office estimates. The settlement has four major monasteries housing about 11,000 Tibetan monks and those studying to be monks. Bylakuppe is, in fact, the oldest and among the largest Tibetan settlements in India—larger even than the one in Dharamsala.

The Tibetans run most local shops in the area. The land, according to Dolma Yangchen of the Tibetan resettlement office, was signed over in a lease to the Dalai Lama.

Phuntsok runs a sweater business out of Amravati in Maharashtra, which he started in 1977 after trying—and failing—to set up businesses in Chikmagalur, Mysore and Bangalore in Karnataka. He buys the woollens from Ludhiana in Punjab.

In Camp 4, where the main monastery called the Golden Temple stands, Savithri, who goes by one name and is a local resident, has been selling samosas for the past two years, mainly to the monks who live in the nearby hostels. For eight years before that, she would wander around the camp selling snacks cooked at home. Before that, she used to be a construction worker, like her father.

She has no qualms about the settlers who have moved into her neighbourhood. It’s not because the Tibetans moved to Bylakuppe that she makes the living she does. But yes, admits Savithri, if not for their presence, she would perhaps still be toiling as a construction worker.

There were originally about 100 houses in each of the Tibetan camps, although that number has increased along with the population. Most families have some land on which they farm, growing mainly maize. Almost all agriculture is rain-fed, with land lying fallow after the monsoon harvest. The families supplement their income by selling sweaters or running restaurants and carpet-weaving centres.

Of his forced migration, Phuntsok says India “accepted us and gave us almost all rights a regular citizen would have”, except he can’t vote in Indian elections or sell the property where his house stands in Camp 1 in Bylakuppe.

The Tibetans hold fast to their identity and still consider themselves guests, which may be the reason for the repeated expressions of gratitude towards their host. There have been few instances of protests in Bylakuppe, camp residents say, except when local autorickshaw drivers had tried to increase fares. The Tibetans responded by boycotting the autorickshaws until an agreement was reached. Most autorickshaws in the area now have a rate card.

There are the inevitable issues over identity, such as when it comes to explaining where they are from.

“Not Indian, yaar—we always have that problem. And then I always say ki, you know, Tibetan settled in Mysore, refugees. Easiest way, you know,” says Penpa Lhamo, 32, who was born in India to Tibetan parents. Lhamo studied journalism at the Madras Christian College in Chennai and worked at The New Indian Express for a while before taking a job as a teacher in a local Tibetan school.

But would Tenzin Chemi, who was born in this country, want to go back to Tibet, which she has never seen? “Yeah definitely, I would like to go back. If it is still ruled out of China, then I can’t stay for long, but if it becomes an independent country, then the feeling is entirely different, and I would like to stick with my country if it becomes independent. Though India has been very generous and provided me with equal rights as a citizen, except the voting thing,” she says.

“I would definitely love to go back to Lhasa because I have grown up listening to stories, and my grandparents...they passed away dreaming and thinking that one day they would definitely go back to Tibet,” says Lhamo. “I would definitely like to settle there if we had the liberty, if we did not have the political restrictions.”

Elizabeth Roche in New Delhi contributed to this story.

This is the fifth of a 10-part series that profiles foreign communities that are contributing to India’s cosmopolitan culture.

Looking for a safe haven

Medical tourism is providing a new source of livelihood to Afghan nationals in New Delhi; But an old problem still remains for these refugees—getting Indian citizenship

05th April 2012

His long beard and meticulously tied turban make it hard to distinguish Balwan Singh from any other Sikh in the country—until you get to peek into his living room or know that his mother tongue is Pashto, spoken predominantly in southern Afghanistan.

Balwan Singh was 25 when he fled from Afghanistan following the December 1979 Soviet invasion of his country. More than 30 years since, he continues to live in New Delhi as a refugee.

Military service was mandatory for every citizen in Afghanistan at the time. But Sikhs and Hindus, he says, were given jobs only as security guards in the predominantly Muslim country. This meant “you didn’t know if you will return home that day” as chaos reigned in the region following the invasion. “After the invasion it was no longer safe to stay back. We came with what we could bring.”

More Afghan nationals in India moved to the country in the 1990s with the emergence of the extremist group Taliban as a political force in their country. This reached a flashpoint in 2001, when the US began military attacks on the Taliban in retaliation for their support to the militant group Al Qaeda that had masterminded the 11 September attacks on the US that year, killing thousands of Americans.

According to the Delhi Police, in the Capital there are around 9,000 Afghans, many of whom stayed back illegally beyond the permitted period. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had 16,400 refugees and some 5,300 asylum-seekers in India registered with it as of 31 August 2011, comprising mainly Afghan, Myanmar and Somali nationals.

“It has been more than 30 years and we have not been given citizenship,” says Singh. “We are fighting a (legal) case to get Indian citizenship.”

Singh’s residence, about 10km from Tilak Nagar in West Delhi, is surrounded by about 50 families, all refugees from Afghanistan living in slum-like conditions. The first noticeable feature of his house is the absence of any furniture. Instead, a carpet stretches to the corners of the room. Guests are invited to sit and dine on the floor. Singh says his family still remains influenced by Afghan traditions such as this. And unlike the fun-loving Punjabi community in India, the Afghan Sikhs are restrained and their women stay inside the confines of their homes.

There are other similar Afghan ghettos in the Capital—in Bhogal, Lajpat Nagar and Malviya Nagar. Many of the families in these settlements run grocery shops or Afghan restaurants or work as cooks and auto rickshaw drivers.

Singh did these jobs until early 2000. Today, he has a better job, ironically because of the instability in his homeland. Singh works as a translator with Apollo Hospital, which is receiving an increasing flow of patients from Afghanistan.

Among the patients for whom Singh works as a translator is Mohammed Omar Khayani, a director at the ministry of rural rehabilitation in Afghanistan. “Healthcare in Afghanistan is very poor. 80% of laboratories and medicines are fake. So I come here every six months,” says Khayani.

Apollo Hospital, like many other speciality hospitals in the Capital, receives nearly one-third of its overseas patients from Afghanistan, according to a hospital spokesperson. In the past year, the hospital treated around 1,250 Afghan patients.

The thriving medical tourism is supporting Afghan immigrants in New Delhi. Four airlines—Air India, Kam Air, Safi Airways and Ariana Afghan Airlines—fly daily between Afghanistan and India, bringing about 800 people daily. As the flights land at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, between 1pm and 5pm, a large number of Afghans take position outside the exit gates in the hope of finding a customer.

“Every day some 100 Afghans come here and they start talking to some of the passengers and become their guides in town,” said an employee of a prepaid taxi service, who declined to be named citing his company’s rules. “Most of them are regulars and they have tied up with hotels, mostly budget hotels in Lajpat Nagar or Malviya Nagar (in south Delhi). At least 30-40 cars are booked from my service, mostly to hospitals or to their hotels.”

Like Khayani, most of the visiting Afghans are not familiar with any language other than their own. Singh assists Khayani with his daily needs in India, from explaining his medical condition to the doctors to taking him to the foreigner’s regional registration office in Delhi.

At the airport exit gates are also policemen in plain clothes watching the Afghan immigrants. Afghans are under the constant watch of various law enforcement agencies that see them as a potential security threat.

The police visit hotels and hospitals across the Capital seeking information on Afghan immigrants and their whereabouts. At the airport, these undercover policemen randomly pick Afghan nationals on suspicion of them being touts or unauthorized guides.

Sayed Basher Kazemi is president of the Kazemi Construction and Road Building Co., which builds roads in Kandahar, one of the most turbulent regions in Afghanistan. In Kabul, he says, he lives in a palatial house with his family of 60. But he comes to India every once in a while to escape the frequent bombings and militancy in his country.

“We have Taliban. We have Pakistani Taliban and also Irani Taliban, American Taliban and UK Taliban... UK Taliban killing American people, American Taliban killing English Taliban, ISI Taliban killing police. We have a lot of Taliban,” says Kazemi, explaining his frequent trips to the “very liberal” India, where he also comes to meet his Russian girlfriend.

tarun.s@livemint.com

When Mowgli met the Lepchas

How a forest officer’s idea on rainwater harvesting helped rejuvenate the dying Himalayan springs in Sikkim

Ananda Banerjee, ananda.b@livemint.com

22nd March 2012

In the upper reaches of Sikkim, there can’t be too many government servants who can actually keep up with and even outrun the sturdy Lepchas, also known as the Rong. Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer Sandeep Tambe is one such rarity. But his recent contribution to the region has been much more vital in nature.

Four years ago, Tambe met a delegation of Lepcha elders who were troubled as the usually bountiful Himalayan mountain springs—locally known as Mohaan, Kuaan and Dhara—were fast drying up because of the usual reasons: increasing population, burgeoning livestock, soil erosion, erratic rainfall, deforestation, forest fires, road construction.

The solution that Tambe hit upon was spring-shed development, which is based on the principles of rainwater harvesting.

“The scientific principle of spring-shed development is to conserve every drop of rainwater where it falls, the ‘running’ water needs to be trained to ‘walk’, and the ‘walking’ water needs to be trained to ‘rest’ for a while,” explained Tambe.

The novelty lies in sustainably developing the spring-shed to increase the percolation of rainwater and thus recharging the ground water. The concept of water harvesting was a completely alien one to the people of the region as scarcity was new to them.

Today, the mountain springs once again gurgle with water—testimony to the success of an initiative that has won the Ground Water Augmentation Award from the ministry of water resources. Tambe credits teamwork for the success of the water conservation effort.

Tambe, 41, had an unorthodox route to the IFS. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and worked for software services firm Infosys Ltd in the US. After spending three years in the corporate world, he came back to India, heeding the call of the wild.

“Happiness lies in the forests and the secrets that it shares with me,” he said. “If I can do anything to protect natural history, that would be my ultimate satisfaction in life.”

After a PhD from the Wildlife Institute of India, he joined the IFS. Hailing from Mandla district in Madhya Pradesh— home to the Kanha National Park and Tiger Reserve, which inspired Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book—the young Tambe always thought of himself as Mowgli. Some of that spirit is still in him—as evident by him being able to hold his own on the steep mountain slopes of Sikkim.

To help reverse the scarcity, Tanbe sought the expertise of WWF-India, the People’s Science Institute (PSI) in Dehradun and the State Institute of Rural Development in Jorethang, Sikkim, to start the spring-shed conservation programme, better known as Dhara Vikas, to rejuvenate the dying springs.

The once well-forested spaces that used to act as water catchment areas had been reduced to a few trees, limiting the percolation of rainwater and creating the hydrological imbalance.

It was estimated that less than 15% of the rainwater was percolating down to recharge the underground springs, while the rest was flowing down as run-off, often causing floods. Global warming and erratic weather patterns had also hurt the spring water resources of Sikkim. The situation was worsened by rain falling in short bursts and extreme weather events becoming more frequent.

The main challenges Tambe and his team faced initially were identifying recharge areas accurately, developing local capacity, encouraging rainwater harvesting in farmers’ fields, and sourcing public financing.

“Water supply programmes have traditionally received priority in public financing, but with the drying up of spring water sources, water supply schemes have taken a beating,” said Tambe.

It was found that the farming practice most amenable to spring recharge was paddy cultivation and in locations where farmers had discontinued agriculture, water sources located downstream had started drying up.

Civil structures such as check dams were unstable and not sustainable on such steep terrain, given the weak geology prone to frequent cloud bursts and heavy rainfall. The non-governmental organizations involved put together a number of engineering measures to harvest rainwater such as conserving soil and moisture with contour trenches and pits, gully plugs and bunds on terraces.

The desilting of dried-up ponds and lakes was among the many interventions that were central to the success of Dhara Vikas.

Further greening measures included brushwood check dams, the planting of shallow-rooted grass that doesn’t need much water, shrubs, hedgerows and trees.

Restrictions were imposed on livestock grazing, fuel-wood gathering and fodder cutting. The recharge area was fenced off.

Work is now under way to revive five springs in the south, east and west districts. Information on nearly 200 springs has been collected and a “web atlas” application that shows village springs being developed to make the information accessible to all users. Weather stations are being set up to record atmospheric changes. The next step is to artificially recharge the Nagi Lake in Namthang by harvesting spring water.

“The existing national rural drinking water programmes need to explore spring-shed development as a means to ensure sustainability of the spring water sources, especially in the mountains,” said Tambe. “A positive step in this direction is a nationwide aquifer-mapping exercise that is being planned along with mountain spring conservation for effective groundwater management.”