[P2P-F] Fwd: [CommonGood] A journey to India

Sun Dec 23 16:00:13 CET 2018

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Birgit Daiber <bir.dai at hotmail.com>
Date: Sun, Dec 23, 2018 at 2:38 PM
Subject: [CommonGood] A journey to India
To: commongood at listi.jpberlin.de <commongood at listi.jpberlin.de>,
wichterich at femme-global.de <wichterich at femme-global.de>, hdeedat at gmail.com <
hdeedat at gmail.com>

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Invited by „Actionaid India“ I had the opportunity to participate in two
outstanding events:

   1. „Actionschool“ organised on the Campus of “Osmania University” in
   Hyderabad.  Young researchers, activists together and experts discuss in
   a three weeks’ seminar issues of basic interest. I had the opportunity to
   participate one week in the seminar and
   2.  a conference in New Delhi on 200 years of Karl Marx and the
   commemoration of Samir Amin, who passed away in August.

*(1)*

This year’s Actionschool subject was “*Urban Commons and Right to the
City“: *

“The course unpacked what constitutes Urban Commons, and how the
understanding of the concept can be applied in the context of cities and
urban spaces. The course used the commons approach to look into the
different parameters of Urban, and embed it into the Right to City
approach. The discussions focussed on how resources for collective use
should be accessed in a regenerative manner to sustain urbanism.” (see:
booklet for the course).

Urban Commons in India are of another dimension than in Europe: Indian
Mega-Cities are not very different from European cities in their structure.
But they are completely different in seize and in their social composition.
Thank you Sandeep Chachra, Pritha Chatterjee and Divitha Shandilya to give
me the opportunity to learn about Urban Commons in India!

India is one of the fastest growing economies of the world. But according
to United Nation's Millennium Development Goals
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals> (MDG)
programme in 2011-2012 270 millions or 21.9% people out of 1.2 billion of
Indians lived below poverty line of $1.25 (no new data are available). And
this situation didn’t change much. Today estimated figures show about 300
million citizens living below poverty line.  In big cities about 30% of the
inhabitants areliving under such conditions. They are working poor:
street-vendors, domestic workers, waste-pickers, construction workers, and
others, women, men and children trying to secure a livelihood, living in
slums or even without any shelter in the streets. The inner Indian
migration process from rural to urban areas continues by different reasons
(privatisation of common land, political disregard of the needs of rural
populations, natural disasters, bad harvests and others).

Here are some of the examples how initiatives of working poor fight for
their right to the city:

*Indu Prakash Singh*, working since many years against poverty and
homelessness in Indian big cities reports on campaigns of the working urban
poor, fighting for dignity and reclaiming themselves as *“city-makers”.* They
are heroes to save the common urban spaces. City-makers fight for dignity,
for shelter rights and residence permits and the campaign is now active in
over 20 cities, including Delhi.  (www.gcssfs.org/InduPrakash Singh)

*The SWaCH wastepickers cooperatives*in the cities of Pune and
Pimpri-Chinchward were successful in setting up cooperatives for
door-to-door waste collection and waste processing instead of dumping. In
Pimpri-Chinchward in collaboration with SNDT Women’s University SWaCH
enabled 1500 women-wastepickers to become service providers for households
in Pune city. This considerably improved their conditions of work and
upgraded their livelihoods, effectively bridging the gap between households
and the municipal waste collection service. The initiative brought together
two interests – the waste pickers’ interest in upgrading their livelihood
and the municipality’s interest in sustainable SWM. (www.swachcoop.com)

Gayatri Nair from Tata-Institute Hyderabad reports from *The traditional
fisher communities of Mumbai - the Kolis. *The example shows that commons
traditions may come into conflict with other initiatives.*The Koli *came
into conflict with the entryof migrant labour in fishing in the highly
urbanised space of Mumbai, and the conflict between local (Koli) and
migrant labour which surfaces around the question of access to common
resources, in this case the seas. Gayatri is analyzing the complex
interplay between the commons, the city and the community, questions about
how the fish-workers should organize. Until the political consciousness of
the community shifts from hostility towards migrants to questioning the
path of development the fisheries is on, the dispossessed Kolis will be
pitted against the dispossessed migrants. (www.Tiss.edu/Gayatri
<http://www.tiss.edu/Gayatri>Nair)

One of the most touching projects I ever visited is *“Shaheen” (the
Falcon) *in the area of Sultan Shahi in the old city of Hyderabad: Founded
by Jameela Nishat, the poet, women of “Shaheen” since 16 years are fighting
against child abuse and for the empowerment of girls and women in this very
poor Muslim area. Activists from “Shaheen” themselves suffered from all
dimensions of abuse and violence and learned to speak out and to develop
their own narratives for dignity and hope. They created their songs within
the traditional “cavalli” expressing their vision. They advocate in schools
to empower girls and boys - as literacy is the key to unlock the cycle of
poverty. And they offer training in life skills and help young women to
become leaders and help them to set up small businesses. The specific
mission of “Shaheen” is to save girls from one of the most terrible abusive
practices, the so-called “child-marriages” (when elderly men from the Arab
peninsula come in, give some money to the families for the right to abuse
very young girls for a while in a hotel – and then disappear). “Shaheen” is
helping girls to negotiate with their families to end this practices.
Within one year “Shaheen” women were able to stop 156 child-marriages in
the area. The biggest challenge they say is to change the mindset of the
people. (www.shaheencollective.org)

And a final look at the wonderful campus of *Osmania-University *with it’s
broad parkways and institutes: midst this environment exist *nine slums *still
populated with families who’s ancestors where construction-workers in the
early 20thcentury on the campus…  4 years ago people from the slums formed
smaller groups of 10 members and they met every Monday, they started with
empowerment strategies, and when in 2016 the big flood destroyed their
homes they could organise some support. They too developed their own
narrative and created “cavalli”. And they learned skills to produce some
goods (b.e. soap and shampoo), they formed assemblies with democratic
structures, they worked on water- and electricity-problems and a childrens’
parliament is established. As most of the women are working as domestic
workers in families (7 days a week without any free time), they started a
Union of domestic workers and they already got guarantees for some free
time. (www.msihyd.org)

By the way: very very often women fighting against misery immediately
invest in the education of their daughters and sons.

*(2)*

*New Delhi*. At the conference on “Contemporary Capitalism and World of
Work” at Jawaharlal Nehru University, organized by Actionaid India I meet
with Hameda Deedat (Unionist from South-Africa), Paris Yeros (Brazil),
Mamdouh Habashy (Egypt) and students from the JNU, and have the privilege
to listen to the  the famous Indian philosophers and intellectuals like
Amiya Bagchi, Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik and activists like Medha Paktar.
 The main focus is the heritage of Marx’ theory and it’s importance for
today’s analysis of capitalism – focussing on globalization and
financialisation as well as “platform-economy”. Many of the speakers refer
to Rosa Luxemburg and her definition of continuous “primary” accumulation
processes as principle of capitalism. Yes, there are massive changes in the
form and dimension of capitalist exploitation – but the mode of production
is still the same. The dialectic between human and nature turned into the
danger of the complete destruction of the planet and the traditional
industrial work disappears – but workers do not disappear and
informalisation of work is still growing.  The challenge is to focus on
today’s composition of working classes, including working poor and rural
communities and the basic role of women for change.

A special session of the conference is dedicated to the commemoration of
Samir Amin. (There is a wonderful video publicly launched on dec.18).
Samir’s last idea is the promotion of a new “Internationale” focussed on
the Global South but open to all leftist forces fighting globalised
capitalism. “Social movements are not enough for change” he said. This idea
can become a new base for strategic debates!

At the end of the conference a new book “Reclaiming Africa” was presented,
edited by Sam Moyo (who died in 2016), Praveen Jha and Paris Yeros
(Springer, 2019).

With all best wishes to you, and our common struggles for change,

peaceful days and a happy New Year,

Yours

Birgit

*bir.dai at hotmail.com <bir.dai at hotmail.com>*
*www.birgitdaiber.eu <http://www.birgitdaiber.eu>*
*Mobile: 0039-366-4207762*

*Casella Postale No. 28, *
*Uff. Posta, Via Vittorio **Emanuele*
*I-98055 Lipari*

_______________________________________________
CommonGood Mailingliste
JPBerlin - Politischer Provider
CommonGood at listi.jpberlin.de
https://listi.jpberlin.de/mailman/listinfo/commongood

-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20181223/0afb44b6/attachment-0001.html>