In spite of spending just four years in Mauritius, Manilal Doctor was able to implement reforms that resulted in Indian labourers transitioning from a state of indentured servitude to being recognised as individuals entitled to basic rights and freedom.
Slavery was abolished in the 1830s but the gruelling fate of the Indians in Fiji — a country in the South Pacific that also has status as an archipelago of more than 300 islands — was persistent, albeit in other forms that did not come under the banner of ‘slavery’. Instead, an indenture system was in place here, introduced by the French in 1826 and adopted by the British four years later.
While the Indians were looking at unending years of misery and despair, one man landed on the shores of the island in 1907. Whilst his stay was short, a total of four years, the changes brought in by him were revolutionary in every sense.
Manilal Doctor, an envoy of Mahatma Gandhi has gone down in history for being a beacon of hope for the Indians. From being indentured labourers, he helped them to become people entitled to their rights and freedom.
Here’s how Manilal’s four years spent on the island changed the course of history.
Born to lead
It all started with a letter.
Addressed to Mahatma Gandhi, the letter implored the social reformist to heed the pleas of the people of Fiji. These were Indians, who in their quest of finding work and a better life in the archipelago, had signed up for a cruel fate. The Indians highlighted their concerns about the mistreatment they faced at the hands of the Britishers, right from their legal rights being ignored to being forced to do arduous work in the cane fields.
Gandhi, who was in South Africa at the time, was saddened to hear about the plight of these Indians and had the letter published in Indian Opinion, a newspaper that he’d established. The daily had a massive reader base, including Manilal Doctor. Upon reading the letter, he was inspired to offer his services and made a trip to South Africa to meet Gandhi.
The latter convinced him to move to Mauritius and lighten the plight of these Indians by using his legal knowledge to get them their due rights. An anecdote tells of how the people of the island were so enthusiastic about finally getting a leader that they pooled 172 pounds together. The money would suffice to pay for Manilal’s ship fare, a home and law books.
Le Mauricien, a French language newspaper, chronicles the many efforts of Manilal Doctor during his stay in the island nation.
“His stay in our midst is full of historic events that have become the rich ingredients for historians to delve into at all ages. He is remembered among Indo-Mauritian historians to have founded the ‘Young Men’s Hindu Association’, the ‘Local Arya Samaj Movement’, and the ‘Hindustani’, a bilingual daily, all these to defend and safeguard the interests of the working-class Indians in this country,” reads an excerpt from an article.
A lifetime’s work in four years
The first issue that Manilal focused on tackling was the “Double Cut” and the “Corvée” systems prevalent on the island. This meant unpaid and forced labour by the Indians for hours on the cane and sugar plantations. And as Totaram Sanadhya, an indentured labourer who later became a Hindu priest, wrote in his book My Twenty One Years in the Fiji Islands, “a smart way of getting the work done”.
“Fiji’s true inhabitants cannot do the work of a labourer well. Their own nature is wholly unsuited to this activity. In the cane fields, one has to do the same work every day (they get fed up from doing this). But the Indian coolies are utterly well-suited for this very activity, and planters generally give the work to them,” reads an excerpt.
Through the brutal systems implemented in the fields, the inhabitants and landlords would declare the Indians as vagrants, and with the help of a justice system and the district magistrate, send them to prison. Finally, the hours of work done by the helpless Indians would yield harvests for the planters and help them financially while the Indians rotted in jail.
Manilal Doctor integrated his legal knowledge into the judicial system ensuring that the labourers were rightly treated. Manilal, along with giving the Indians legal advice, would also write their letters and petitions and fight their cases in court for a low fee. As the indentured labour system began fading out in 1916, he then focused his efforts on helping the Indians get political rights.
An organisation is born
The Indian Imperial Association of Fiji was inaugurated on 2 June, 1918, and meetings were frequently held and presided over by the chairman, none other than Manilal Doctor.
Following the meetings, the streets would be filled with chants of “Hindu-Mussalman ki jai,” “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai” and “Mahatma Tilak ki jai”, which irked the British. The meetings along with demands voiced by the Indians finally culminated at the end of the indenture system of labour on 1 January, 1920.
However, empowered by their leader Manilal, the Indians continued their strikes not willing to settle for long working hours. This, the British decided was enough retaliation they had seen.
In his book, The Fiji Indians: Challenges to European Dominance, 1920-1946, Kenneth Gillion, a New Zealand academic wrote, “On 27 March an Order was made under the Peace and Good Order Ordinance, 1875 prohibiting Manilal, Mrs Manilal, Harpal Maharaj (a Hindu priest) and Fazil Khan (a wrestler) from residing for two years on Viti Levu or Ovalau or within Macuata province on Vanua Levu. Legally, this was not a sentence of deportation, but it amounted to the same thing, as the areas named were the main areas of Indian settlement and the only places where Indians could earn a living in Fiji.”
It was time for Manilal to leave the island he had helped. Through the course of the four years that he spent there, over 60,965 Indian labourers were helped.
While the lawyer returned to India, where he passed away in 1953, the impact of his work lives on in history.
The post History Behind How a Lawyer From Gujarat Led 1000s of Indian Labourers to Freedom in Fiji appeared first on VVDesigns.]]>You may also like
Liver Problems and its Ayurvedic Treatment
Indian communities are planting trees to celebrate local customs and events such as weddings and funerals to help restore degraded land
BIKANER, India, June 3 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – With saplings in hand and faces veiled by colourful sarees, Suman and Sarita Takariya’s relatives sang traditional songs as the sisters planted small shrubs at their combined pre-wedding celebration in a remote Indian village.
Suman, 21, and Sarita, 19, who married their husbands in a joint ceremony, are part of a growing trend in the western desert state of Rajasthan in which families gift and plant native trees as a new addition to their local customs and rituals.
“They are a part of our family now,” Sarita said as she cleaned her muddy hands after planting an oleander shrub.
“We will leave for our in-laws’ place, but they (the trees) will be here for our parents.”
The sisters’ wedding card said: “Protect nature and nature will protect us”.
From weddings, births and funerals to festivals such as Holi, and even family achievements like buying a new car, plants and trees have become centrepieces of local culture, helping to breathe life into the sandy soils of northwestern Rajasthan.
More and more villagers are adopting the practice as they see the benefits, whether easy access to fruit or cool shade, said Shyam Sunder Jyani, the man behind “Familial Forestry”, which aims to connect trees with families and their rituals.
But soil scientists warn that planting trees alone is not sufficient to combat the growing problem of land degradation.
Rajasthan is India’s largest state and also the most degraded when it comes to land, meaning it suffers a persistent decline in soil quality and its capacity to be productive.
Factors such as climate change, over-grazing, excessive cultivation, deforestation and urbanisation play a role in land degradation and desertification.
The problem affects people’s food security and incomes, and leaves them vulnerable to weather-related disasters such as drought.
“That is why it’s important to build green infrastructure because it creates a knock-on effect, combating everything from food insecurity to climate change,” said Jyani in Bikaner city, which is near the rolling dunes of the Thar Desert.
Trees can increase organic content in the ground, recycle nutrients, and boost the water-holding capacity of soil, as well as absorbing climate change-fuelling carbon dioxide emissions.
Soil also naturally absorbs carbon from the atmosphere through a process known as sequestration which not only reduces harmful greenhouse gases but also creates more fertile soil.
Jyani said a proven way to ensure more tree planting was by making trees “green members” of families.
“When we personify a tree, then it connects the family emotionally … and that makes the tree a part of them,” said the 43-year-old sociology professor.
“By clubbing tree plantation with rituals and festivals, which are pillars of our social life, we make people empathetic towards their local ecology and surroundings.”
FRUITFUL GAINS
Rajasthan has few forests compared with other states. They make up just 8% of its total land area, government analysis and data show.
But in the last 16 years, more than a million families from at least 15,000 villages in the state have planted about 3.5 million saplings as part of the “Familial Forestry” project.
More than a dozen participants in the programme told the Thomson Reuters Foundation they were literally enjoying the fruits – and flowers – of their labour, seeing increased ground water levels, improved crop yields, and ultimately more income.
“The trees have changed my life. The fruits are as sweet as the ones I had as a little boy. Birds that I had not seen in decades are back,” said teacher Brij Mohan Singh, as he gave out saplings to guests at a lunch event for his son’s wedding.
“This is for my grandchildren, for the next generation. We have to leave a healthy environment for them, especially as the threat of (global warming) increases every day.”
Singh said he had planted five saplings at home and helped his school plant more than 7,000, which provide a cool canopy for students in the scorching summer heat, as temperatures often soar above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit).
“They say they feel like they are sitting in an air-conditioned room,” he added.
Laxmi Kant Sharma, a professor of earth sciences at Central Rajasthan University, praised “Familial Forestry” for tapping into India’s age-old roots of conserving forest resources.
But he warned that it was important to only plant indigenous trees as others often “become killers of native species of the desert” and can harm wildlife habitats.
Jyani, who won the Land for Life award from the United Nations’ anti-desertification agency last year, said he teaches communities to plant only native species such as the Khejri, Rajasthan’s state tree, which requires very little water.
RICH SOIL, HEALTHY LIFE
India vowed to restore 26 million hectares of the country’s degraded land – or nearly 27% – by 2030 when it hosted the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) conference in 2019.
Almost 30% of the land in India is suffering degradation, a report by state-run space agency ISRO found last year.
Rattan Lal, an Indian-American award-winning soil scientist whose moniker is the “Godfather of Soil Science”, is urging the government to start a scheme that would pay farmers 2,325 rupees ($30) for each tonne of carbon dioxide their land absorbs.
Such “carbon credits” are increasingly popular financial instruments, with companies or governments that want to “offset” their own emissions paying others to reduce or prevent the release of greenhouse gases for them.
Credits can support things like solar farms or planting trees, allowing farmers to monetise the carbon their fields soak up – though accurately measuring and verifying emissions reductions remains tricky.
Still, such credit systems can incentivize people “for doing good”, Lal said in a video interview from Columbus, Ohio.
Farmers often feed their crop residue to cattle and use it to make homes and fences – or even for cooking – when it could instead be returned to the soil to boost its organic matter.
Lal also suggested schools include more nature-oriented literature to spread environmental awareness early on.
Celebrity Indian spiritual leader Jaggi Vasudev – known as Sadhguru – is on a one-man mission to spotlight the issue.
He recently finished a 30,000 km (18,640 mile) trip across Europe, the Middle East and India by motorcycle to raise awareness about the deteriorating state of the world’s soil.
“Healthy soil and healthy life are inextricably connected,” Sadhguru said at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. “In the next 10 to 15 years we can make a significant turnaround.”
In Rajasthan, Harinath Siddh said he had played his part by gifting and planting saplings at his wedding earlier this month.
“I wanted to show (my wife) that I care about the environment,” the 25-year-old said.
“And this way we will be able to care for these trees like they are our own children and watch them grow.”
The post Indian weddings go green with new tree-planting traditions appeared first on VVDesigns.]]>India’s U-turn on wheat exports is a result of incorrect estimates derived from an archaic crop forecasting system devised 4 centuries ago by emperor Akbar’s finance minister.
New Delhi: Tharavamat Nanda Kumar vividly remembers the day, some 16 years ago, when he visited the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
A few days before the visit, Kumar, then the additional chief secretary of Jharkhand, had received an SOS call to report to Delhi and take over as secretary of food and public distribution. The country was going through a wheat crisis. Signs of a shortage were evident. Public stocks were dwindling.
The government, headed by Manmohan Singh at the time, had already decided to import wheat.
When Kumar, then 56, went for a briefing at the PMO, he was advised by an official: “Do not rely solely on the wheat production estimates from the agriculture ministry. Talk to traders, look for price signals from domestic and international markets, do your own homework and research before making a decision.”
Kumar followed the advice diligently. But the ministry he once served seems to have failed to learn from its series of missteps between 2003 and 2006 — when India exported wheat to draw down public stocks and later resorted to imports.
In 2022, wheat is back in the news after a record-breaking heat wave in March blighted the crop. The event followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in end-February which pushed global prices of wheat to record highs. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, global wheat prices were 56 per cent higher year-on-year in May.
Mid-February, the agriculture ministry estimated the crop production to be a record 111.3 million tonnes (second advance estimate).
“That was the number the food and commerce ministries took to make critical policy decisions including pushing export. And, as we know by now, those numbers were not accurate,” Kumar told ThePrint over the phone from Kerala where he now lives.
Mid-April, India’s food and commerce minister Piyush Goyal said India is targeting to export 10-15 million tonnes of wheat and fill a part of the supply void created by the Russia-Ukraine war. In less than a month, India had to take a U-turn after realising the crop size is smaller than estimated.
According to Kumar, there is “an urgent need to clean our data systems in agriculture”.
Speaking to ThePrint, a senior official with an international commodity trading firm, who wished to not be named, said that the system to determine yield estimates still relies on an archaic system developed by Raja Todar Mal, the finance minister of Mughal emperor Akbar, more than 450 years ago, adopted and refined during British rule.
And it’s not just wheat, yield estimates of cotton and horticulture crops like tomato, too, can be erroneous.
‘Bad data used at the wrong time’
After the food ministry failed to purchase enough wheat for its food security schemes — public procurement fell short of target by a staggering 25 million tonnes — the government banned exports on the evening of 13 May.
The purpose was to tame domestic food inflation, which surged to a high of 8.4 per cent year-on-year in April.
On 19 May, the agriculture ministry revised wheat production estimates down to 106.4 million tonnes (third advance estimate).
The United States Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service released an even lower number in late May — 99 million tonnes — following field visits to major wheat-growing states. Current trade estimates hover between 90 million tonnes and 100 million tonnes. No one seems to know the exact production number.
“India is building a digital Agristack and has technologies like drones, remote sensing, artificial intelligence and machine learning at its disposal, yet it is relying on the dubious integrity of the local patwari (revenue officer) who often records data without visiting the field. Only a fraction of crop-cutting experiments for yield estimation actually happen on ground,” Kumar said. “It’s a case of bad data used at the wrong time.”
Crop-cutting experiments (CCEs) are conducted in randomly selected plots of specific size to record the quantity of grains harvested to estimate yields.
According to the agriculture ministry’s Directorate of Economics and Statistics, about 1.4 million CCEs were carried out by state governments in 2016-17, to estimate yields of grains and pulses. The technical guidance and sample checks during the process is provided by the National Statistical Office.
In addition, the central ministry is currently running two projects, FASAL (Forecasting Agricultural output using Space, Agro-meteorology and Land-based observations) and CHAMAN (Coordinated Horticulture Assessment and Management using geo-informatics), for more accurate estimates. But results are yet to show.
This year, wheat may be in the limelight but cotton, too, shares a similar fate. The agriculture ministry overestimated the area planted, but a sharp drop in supplies led to a surge in prices compared to last year, said the senior official with an international commodity trading firm quoted earlier.
“When it comes to yield estimates, the budgets are so low that local revenue officials seldom visit the field for CCEs. There is hardly any use of ground truthing aided with satellites or remote sensing. Decisionmakers still rely on a system developed by Raja Todar Mal,” the official added.
Todar Mal, finance minister of Mughal emperor Akbar who ruled India between 1556 and 1605, is credited with putting in place the architecture of a revenue collection system after a thorough survey of crop production and prices.
Now, the over-reliance on an archaic system also means that farmers do not have reliable commodity intelligence while taking planting decisions.
“In the absence of a robust futures market, farmers often take past prices as the only guidance while choosing between competing crops, leading to higher volatility,” said Arshad Perwez, Chief Revenue Officer at Our Food, a Hyderabad-based farm supply chain startup.
A little too late
According to the agriculture ministry, advance estimates of production of major crops largely rely on area statistics before actual crop-cutting experiments are carried out.
For instance, the final production estimates for wheat harvested in April-May this year will be released in February 2023, a little too late for food management and trade policy decisions.
“The advance estimates of crop production can at best provide a signal… we function with the belief that random errors will cancel each other out at an aggregate level,” said Avinash Kishore, research fellow at the New Delhi office of the International Food Policy Research Institute.
“Our entire data system is designed for grains, although in value terms horticulture, milk and livestock has far surpassed foodgrains. Yet, data gathering on these is horribly poor.”
Kishore cited several examples of non-existent or poor-quality data. For instance, milk production is known to fall sharply during the summer months and surge during the winter. But there are no estimates of the impact of heat on milk production. So, it remains unclear how the ongoing heat wave is impacting cattle productivity.
Similarly, production estimates of horticulture crops that are harvested in short intervals (multiple pickings), such as mangoes and tomatoes, are ridden with errors — a reason why volatility in prices of perishables is a recurrent pain for both consumers and farmers.
Over the past year, average tomato retail prices rose by a staggering 146 per cent (as on 5 June), shows data from the consumer affairs ministry. This might prompt farmers to plant more, leading to a crash in prices and tomatoes dumped by the roadside a few months later.
“We have no reliable data on value chains or how much food is wasted during transit, at warehouses or on the neighbourhood vendor’s push-cart. When a banana is over-ripe, it is sold for a lower price. The loss of value there is larger than the quantity loss,” Kishore said. “To become the export powerhouse India desires to be, it needs to pay attention to these data gaps.”
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