Arvind Kejriwal’s battle against corruption

So young and so brave. The opposite of that now-famous line that once aptly described a Filipino bureaucrat-turned politician: So young and so corrupt.

Arvind Kejrawal of India is this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Emergent Leadership. Only 38 years old, Kejrawal has spent six years now fighting corruption that is so ingrained in India’s bureaucracy. It has not been a desperate, useless battle though. His efforts have yielded results and benefited the simple and the lowly whose concerns might not have merited the attention of the high and the mighty.

I caught up with Kejrawal the other day during the launching of RM Award Foundation’s (RMAF) 3rd, 4th and 5th volumes of “Great Men and Women of Asia” (Anvil Publishing)—must-haves for school libraries. Kejrawal battles must indeed soon be part of the inspiring stories in these books (for which I have written a number of stories) that should inspire the young and confound the wise and, uh, wily.

(RMAF formal awarding ceremonies will be held tonight at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Inquirer founding chair Eugenia “Eggie” Apostol is this year’s awardee for Journalism, Literature and Creative Comm
unication Arts.)

Kejrawal finished engineering but landed in the Indian Revenue Service early on. It’s most everyone’s dream to work in the civil service, Kejrawal explained. As a deputy commissioner for income tax, he saw bribe-taking as a matter of course. He saw how this affected ordinary citizens. In the beginning, Kejrawal’s appeals to tax officials were for naught so he and several kindred spirits initiated a Public Interest Litigation directing the department to implement a transparency plan. This was followed by a non-violent protest and a warning that the media would be around.

Kejrawal took a leave from his job and with his group, Parivartan (meaning “change”), first zeroed in on the government-run electricity department where paying of bribes was the order of the day. Any transaction made by consumers—electrical installation, complaints on bills, and the like—meant grease money.

Parivartan pushed and popularized its “Don’t pay bribes!” campaign. It offered consumers a hand by facilitating their dealings with the electricity department. In no time Parivartan was able to demand action on thousands of cases without a cent being handed over to bribe takers.

Kejrawal explained that there are two types of bribery—the extortional and the mutual. The first is common in government offices where people go to get things done. But, you can’t have it if you don’t pay bribe. The second happens between the bribe-taker and the briber. Your tax due could be lowered in your favor if you give the taxman something. Both profit from the deal.

This is not something new. But discovering innovative and successful means to curb it is always a challenge.

Because of what Parivartan started, the Delhi Right to Information Act of 2001 was soon passed, giving citizens the right to inspect government documents, follow up and demand to know what government agencies are doing or have done.

Kejrawal and Parivartan first put this law to use in a New Delhi slum area by monitoring a public works project. Not long after, residents did a “social audit” of 68 more projects. They held meetings and street plays, conducted public hearings and revealed their findings of misappropriations and embezzlement in 64 projects in the amount of seven million rupees.

The residents of that area learned how to monitor projects block by block and examine contracts before projects are started.

Another case involved wheat and rice rations for the poor. Parivartan discovered and exposed how 90 percent was being skimmed off by government officials in collusion with traders.

But boldness and alacrity on the part of the bribe-busters had a price. One Parivartan member was brutally attacked but luckily survived. (He is here with Kejrawal.) Some 5,000 residents staged protests and a “rations fast” to demand a clean-up. The government acted.

Kejrawal pointed out that not every one in the bureaucracy is corrupt. “But honesty may not get you the best post,” he said. There is a chain from the bottom to the top and the honest one who becomes a “block in the chain” could be relegated to the sidelines, he said.

And what about the work they had started by helping people do “no-bribe” transactions? Yes, they were worried about dependency, Kejrawal admitted, and they could not always be there to watch over everything.

And so the next step was to draft a citizen’s “Right to Information” form that contained the citizens’ rights as well as their demand to know the status of their complaint, request or transaction. It is a weapon, a strong way of saying to officials concerned: “I expect service from you.”

Within three months 200 people who used this method were able to get the service they needed.

Now on its seventh year, Parivartan has only 10 full-time members but it has trained 1,700 volunteers from about 700 organizations. Paarivartan, Kejrawal explains, is more of a movement rather an institution. As such, it is not registered and operates without institutional funding. It gets its support from ordinary citizens who want to see it continue. It has linked up with NGOs across India so more ordinary citizens, the poor especially, would be empowered and the government would be accountable to them.

Kejrawal always reminds that services should be delivered honestly and conscientiously because the citizens, the poor especially, are entitled to them.

247

Just before I sat down to write this piece yesterday, I was reading the Inquirer banner story about another killing, that of peasant leader Hermilito Marqueza in Tandag, Surigao del Sur last Sunday. The lead paragraph said this happened hours after Pres. Arroyo announced the creation of an independent commission that would investigate the wave of politically linked killings.

Marqueza was the 247th victim of this “type” of killing since 2001 when Pres. Arroyo became president. If one goes by the victims listed in Amnesty International’s (AI) report released last week, Marqueza should be the 51st victim of year 2006. AI’s list ended with victim number 50, city mayor Delfinito Albano who was killed on June 27, 2006. The 49th is Wilfredo Cornea, of Task Force Mapalad, who was killed on June 20, 2000.

But one cannot breezily go down the list that way. After AI’s number 50 there must have been a few more before Marqueza who did not make it to the AI list and deadline. I cannot believe that there were no victims in July. What, no victims? That would have been unusual. Killings have been so common, so every-day, that a sudden lull is unbelievable. Marqueza is not the 51st, he’s probably the 55th. Throw in a couple of slain journalists in between.

I am appalled that I am talking numbers, sequence and lists here, like these victims were just to be ticked off a list. But they happen to have names and faces, they have families, professions, places in their communities, organizations, churches and in the hearts of those they loved and those who loved them.



I think of the 247, or even just of the 51, 52 or 53, and I think of whole families and communities that grieve for them and have been diminished because of their deaths, shocked and terrified by the way they were slain. I think of the grief that turns into fury, hot tears, clenched fists.

I am tempted to grab a calculator hoping to arrive at a number that would expand the impact but then, I thought, doing so would further reduce and relegate both the dead and the living victims to the statistics department. Numbers and lists serve a purpose but there are things one cannot quantify.

What is the future of the orphaned children, how will they move on, who will resume the work of those who were murdered, what is the impact of the slaying on the community…

Walang kalaban-laban, is how we say it in Filipino. No literal word-for-word translation for that. But it is a scenario where a victim—unarmed, unaware, unprepared, outnumbered and with no chance to fight back—is gunned down by men he or she does not know, men who emerge from the shadows and strike without warning.

Well, not exactly without warning, for not a few victims had been threatened and served notice, a not-so-strange tactic meant to set the stage for the kill.

But I also think of the perpetrators of these serial murders. Who are they, what are they? Who sent them, who funded them? Do they have personal motives? Is one death related to another? Is one perpetrator related to another?

Is this entire wave the handiwork of like-minded people acting in concert? Or are the incidents separate and the perpetrators disparate in thinking, but riding on the same wave to carry out their motives and inflict harm in rapid-fire succession in order to confuse and terrify their prey?

As they say, pwedeng sakyan ng kakit sino, any one could take advantage of the situation. Sure, but this started somewhere, by some minds. This is not a spontaneous, un-orchestrated wave.

This terrible phenomenon or wave or series is bigger than all the individual killings combined. And one cannot but lament that it took this long, it took these many unsolved killings, for the President to call for an independent investigation. More than 50 on the eighth month, why not 90 by Christmas?

I don’t know how the investigating commission tasked by the President will proceed. Will this simply be a fact-gathering, report-writing exercise? Will the commission come up with something similar to AI’s, that is, facts, recommendations, conclusions.

But will any of the crimes be solved? At least a few, so we would know the whys? Should we call in “CSI”? Sure, the killings must stop. But it is not enough that the so-called extra-judicial killings stop. We need answers. The least the bereaved families and the rest of us would like to know is who did it, who ordered it, and why. And most of all, whether justice will be served.

What has not happened yet is a backlash reminiscent of the late 1980s that saw policemen on patrol being gunned down like sitting ducks by armed anti-government groups. Some of the victims were picked because of their “reputation” and dismal human rights track record. Revolutionary justice, it is called. Others were victims of the agaw-armas (pistol-seizing) campaign of armed ideologues. Walang kalaban-laban, people would say of the poor young cops killed on the beat.

More than 10 years ago I did a long magazine story on the wave of killings of that time. I interviewed bereaved families from both sides and what did I learn?

There is no name for the pain.

Tyre and Sidon

Tyre and Sidon. The names of these two ancient biblical cities have been floating in my head since the fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah began a month ago. These two coastal cities in Lebanon are always shown on the war maps on TV, being among the places threatened by Israeli fire.

These cities are mentioned in the bible 14 times, always as a pair (like Sodom and Gomorrah) and in significant situations that they have a way of remaining in one’s subconscious. In mine, at least. But since I’m no bible scholar, I couldn’t easily find where in the bible they’re mentioned.

Then last week, at the height of the Middle East crisis, the twin names popped up on the Inquirer’s “The Daily Gospel” readings. Synchronicity?

The names are mentioned in Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman who begged him to heal her demon-possessed daughter. The scene portrays an example of great faith and feminine spunk. But Tyre and Sidon are mentioned here rather casually, to only establish the location perhaps, while in other parts of the bible, the mention of Tyre and Sidon seems to have greater significance. Like the ones in Isaiah 23, Joel, Luke and Matthew.



I started off by doing a biblical research exercise. Where first to start if not in the Inquirer research department. The research head, Miner Generalao, is a budding Catholic biblical scholar who has been taking biblical courses even while sharpening her expertise in e-research on any topic under the sun.

One of the first things I learned from her was how to search the bible online, all versions if I wanted. She started me off with the Revised Standard Version (RSV) which we used in college theology class. (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/rsv.browse.html) My initial “Tyre and Sidon” search (as a pair) turned up 14 matches grouped “by work”.

Maccabees (Apocrypha)5:15 - While they were reading this letter, suddenly other messengers, in torn clothes, arrived from Galileee to deliver a similar message: that against them had gathered together men of Ptolemais and Tyre and Sidon, and all Galilee of the Gentiles, "to annihilate us."

2 Esdras (Apocrypha) 1:11 - I have destroyed all nations before them, and scattered in the east the people of two provinces, Tyre and Sidon; I have slain all their enemies.

Acts 12:20: Now Herod was angry with the people of Tyre and Sidon; and they came to him in a body, and having persuaded Blastus, the king's chamberlain, they asked for peace, because their country depended on the king's country for food.

Jeremiah 47:4 - Because of the day that is coming to destroy all the Philistines, to cut off from Tyre and Sidon every helper that remains. For the Lord is destroying the Philistines, the remnant of the coastland of Caphtor.

Joel 3:4 - "What are you to me, O Tyre and Sidon, and all the regions of Philistia? Are you paying me back for something? If you are paying me back, I will requite your deed upon your own head swiftly and speedily.

Luke 6:17 - And he came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases…

Luke 10:13 (and Matthew 11:21) - "Woe to you, Chora'zin! woe to you, Beth-sa'ida! for if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.

Luke 10: 14 (and Matthew 11: 22) - But it shall be more tolerable in the judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you…

Mark 3: 8 - …and Jerusalem and Idume'a and from beyond the Jordan and from about Tyre and Sidon a great multitude, hearing all that he did, came to him.

Mark 7: 24 - And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house, and would not have any one know it; yet he could not be hid.

Matthew 15: 21 - And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon.

Zechariah 9:2 - Hamath also, which borders thereon, Tyre and Sidon, though they are very wise.

The entire chapter 23 of Isaiah has “Tyre and Sidon” as title. I like Isaiah with the soaring, wailing style. Listen to him:

“Oracle on Tyre: Wail, O ships of Tarshish, for your port is destroyed; From the land of Kittim the news reaches them. Silence! You who dwell on the coast, your merchants of Sidon…Shame O Sidon, fortress on the sea, for the sea has spoken… Who has planned such a thing against Tyre, the bestower of crowns, Whose merchants are princes, whose traders are the earths’s honored men…At the end of the 70 years the Lord shall visit Tyre. She shall return to her hire and deal with all the world’s kingdoms on the face of the earth. But her merchandise and her hire shall be sacred to the Lord. It shall not be stored up or laid away, but from her merchandise those who dwell before the Lord shall eat their fill and clothe themselves in choice attire.”

Tyre was an ancient Phoenician port city on the Mediterranean coast of what is today southern Lebanon just north of the boarder of Israel. According to historians, Sidon was the oldest Phoenician city but Tyre eventually exceeded Sidon in fame and posterity.

Sure, Jesus used Tyre and Sidon unflatteringly to denounce Chorazin and Bethsaida. But, ah, more poetic and tragic is his denunciation of Jerusalem: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but you were unwilling! Behold your house will be abandoned, desolate.”

Some hardcore biblical websites consider the present-day conflicts in the Middle East as Old Testament prophecies come to pass.

Accidental heroes, reluctant exiles

The armed conflict going on between Israel and the Hezbollan in Lebanon that is forcing thousands of terrified overseas Filipino workers (OFW) to go home, the stories and the images one reads, hears and sees are the stuff OFW nightmares are made of.

I couldn’t help thinking of the many past crises in that part of the world that OFWs have had to bear. And I thought, if we were to put together the feature stories on the overseas Filipino workers that came out in the Inquirer, the human interest stories particularly, and the photos too, they would fill several volumes. This has been playing in my head for days now. (By the way, the Inquirer has a book publishing department.) The stories would form part of our written national history. As they are, they would also be interesting stories—cinematic, dramatic, heart-rending, tear-jerking, sad, triumphant. Future generations would certainly look upon these stories with amazement at how their ancestors survived hardships in hostile lands in order to give their descendants a better life.

I have lost count of the many OFW stories I have written over the years. There was this Filipino domestic helper (DH) in Kuwait who killed her employer (a cruel princess) while they were vacationing in Cairo, while another DH lived it up in another royal household somewhere across the desert. Here were husbands and children who were left behind by the women in their lives, and NGOs that help OFW families stay whole. Recently I wrote about the Filipinos who work aboard a luxury cruise ship.



Pre-departure areas in international airports abroad, particularly in Europe and the Middle East, where homecoming OFWs gather for their final flight home, are places where one could eavesdrop on or join in OFW conversations. How long have they been away, where did they work, what was it like, who did they leave behind at home and who are meeting them in Manila, what are their pasalubongs. The stories are endless.

I suddenly feel uneasy when I am asked where I have come from and have to give an honest answer so unlike theirs—that I was away for only a week or so, that I am a journalist on a work-related trip, or worse, a turista. On learning that, some start calling me “Ma’am” but continue to tell their story.

Recently I went over past issues of the Sunday Inquirer magazine where many of the longer features on OFWs had come out. I remember how we put together a whole issue on the OFWs who braved the bombs and suffered hunger, thirst and the desert heat while trying to escape the 1990s Gulf War and finding a way to go home to the Philippines.

The stories of and about the OFWs that appeared over the Inquirer’s 20 years have moved on like a progressing plot, so to speak. The allegorical Every OFW must be awfully worn out by now, advancing in age, but still slaving away in faraway lands, dreaming of that day when he or she could finally come home, the growing number of dependent grandchildren notwithstanding.

New Year 1995 it was when the Inquirer announced that the OFW was Inquirer’s Filipino of the Year for 1994. I look at the Jan. 1, 1995 front page right now and the front-page photo of a returning OFW stares at me. There she is, looking straight at the camera, her long hair somewhat disheveled and wearing a branded sweat shirt and denim pants, carrying loads of pasalubong—a carton, a bag and several plastic bags. An inside photo has more of the same—a group of sturdy, smiling men with hand-carried stuff, striding out of the airport.

I look at the un-bylined piece (which I, uh, wrote) and I ask, “What is wrong with the title?” The kicker is “1994 Filipino of the Year” and the title is “The overseas contract worker.”

Well, we don’t call them overseas contract workers (OCW) anymore. We now call them overseas Filipino workers (OFW). Frankly, I don’t know when, how or why the change happened or who decreed it. One day we just found ourselves saying OFW. The new three-letter name seemed more all-embracing and therefore included even the so-called highly paid Filipino expats abroad who also have contracts with their employers. OFW could no longer refer to OCWs from other countries. It is exclusive to Filipinos. And so it is not the contract, Virginia, it is the Filipino. Or is OFW a euphemism for OCW? Is it more politically correct? What happened to “internationally shared human resources”?

Filipinos have a penchant for re-labeling, as if situations would improve with the change of names. Isn’t this what the superstitious do with sickly infants?

“Our citizens to the world,” former Pres. Ramos called them. “Modern-day heroes,” former Pres. Aquino said. A churchman even considered them as “the most potent missionary resource.” To many they are simply dollar earners. Hounded by poverty and unemployment, these accidental heroes and reluctant exiles have had to leave home for their families’ survival.

But their daring is no match to the bombs that have been falling recently. One returning DH said her Lebanese employers refused to let her leave and told her, “You are only a Filipina, you are not an American, no one will mind you.” One who used bed sheets to escape through the window and then fell to her death. The Inquirer’s banner photo yesterday was that of an OFW on a stretcher. She had jumped out of the window because her employers wouldn’t let her go. I know this is un-Christian but I can’t help but snarl at those employers: I hope the rockets find you and blow you to that place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Environmental group sounds an alarm

What is wrong with this piece of news? What is wrong with this picture?

Not so long ago the Manila Bulletin came out with a story that said that The Fuhua Group of China has broken ground in Silang, Cavite. It launched the “first of 500 technology demonstration and industrial processing sites that will be put up in the Philippines over the next five years.”

The industrial site will run under the Philippine Fuhua Sterling Agricultural Corp. (PFSAC) and is part of what is called a programmed production from a corn-sorghum facility from which will come ethanol and other by-products such as milky starch livestock feed, corn protein, corn oil and amino acid.

According to the article by Melody M. Aguiba, the ethanol supply from the integrated plants is apparently aimed at beefing up China’s ethanol requirement in its intensive drive to shift to cheaper and renewable biofuel as alternative to dwindling crude oil. China is also stepping up production in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos.



“Renewable biofuel as alternative to crude oil” sounds great at first as compared with fossil fuel with its pollutive effects. Plants are good because they could be grown in big quantities and made to multiply.

And listen to what one of the people behind the project said. “This is a two-hectare processing plant that will have laboratories for hybrid corn and hybrid sorghum. We’ll construct one like this in 500 sites all over the country.”

The article further said: The PFSAC project involves planting of hybrid corn on a total of one million hectares over the next five years that will produce a huge 18.2 million MT of corn after three years. Hybrid sweet sorghum, which yields eight to 10 MT per hectare using planting materials from China compared to the traditional yield of two to three MT per hectare, will also be planted together with the hybrid corn.”
Now, what is this hybrid corn?

Lingkod Tao-Kalikasan (LTK), an environmental group has issued an alarm on this corn. This hybrid corn could be Bt corn. “What at first appears as good news is truly alarming,” says Sr. Aida Velasquez, OSB, LTK coordinator. “In several instances from North to South, farmers got hybrid corn which has turned out to be Bt corn.”

Velasquez warns against “the invasion of GM (genetically modified) crops in the country.” One of the questions she poses is: how adequate and effective are regulatory and monitoring mechanisms for GMOs (genetically modified organisms)?

A lot has been written about and against Bt corn. Scientists have been warning against gene contamination such as what happened in Spain where GM maize was planted on 32,000 hectares of land. Not only was there contamination, the livelihood of farmers was threatened and agricultural biodiversity was undermined.

Velasquez asks: “How can our farmers survive if a lot of the native varieties of crops would be contaminated by GM crops? What will happen to our local varieties of corn, and later, rice, banana, papaya, abaca, eggplant and mongo?”

As the news report said, while the technology demonstration site for corn-sorghum in Silang may involve only 15 hectares, actual corn sites in other parts of the country including Isabela, Nueva Ecija and Camarines Sur may cover 100 hectares in each province.

Planting will soon start and after the harvest, an ethanol plant may be constructed near the corn fields. Investment in each ethanol plant may range from P5 to P6 billion, the report said. All that investment will need infrastructure support for which Fuhua may enter into a build-operate-transfer scheme with the Philippine government. Fuhua, the report said, owns the world’s second largest corn processing facility after the one in the US and supplies 60 percent of China’s huge corn demand.

Big investments may mean big number of jobs but at what cost that the future generations might have to pay because of the environmental disaster that might happen?

Greenpeace has come out with a report titled “The Economics of Bt corn in the Philippines.” It says that Bt corn in the Philippines was designed to be resistant to the Asiatic corn borer, one of the most destructive corn pests hereabouts. Bt corn has also been presented as a practical and ecologically sustainable solution that would help poor corn farmers improve the crop yields.

But, Greenpeace argues, Bt corn is definitely not a biological means of controlling pests and is not ecologically sustainable. Why? Because genetically modified or engineered organisms are unpredictable. When released to the environment, they produce unexpected results that could prove damaging in the long term.

But what is the alternative? Synchronized planting by farmers with adjacent farms is a method that could prevent heavy corn borer attacks per farm. Planting during the dry season is another way. Detasselling is another. This means taking out 75 percent of the tassel (the corn borer’s primary food source) per field.

Bt corn could also result in soil toxification and pest resistance.

Corn is indeed an amazing plant. Corn has fed and moved civilizations, it has been part of society’s evolution since the dawn of time. And now it is no longer just food, it has great potential as fuel. What is worrisome is that with humans tinkering with its biological integrity, it might just strike back.

****

Watch “Catch a Dream”, a fund-raising concert by Joe Mari Chan for a school that admits poor students who cannot pay. At the Meralco Theater at 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 5. For tickets call 4613278, 9394714, 4272703, 0916-3893320, 0927-8488400.