Nuapatna (Odisha) weavers struggle to keep traditional profession alive

By-Manish Kumar

Nuapatna, April 23: Waking up early in the morning and working till midnight on their weaving looms in their homes is not at all a strange thing for hundreds of weavers in Nuapatna village, around 80 kms from Bhubaneswar. This village is known to the people of the state and also to many foreign tourists as a village of weavers where almost all houses have their indoor looms and on an average three people of every family are directly involved in weaving.

However, of late, weavers of this village have been facing several day-to-day hassles, which are affecting their production. The latest problem to plague them is the declining availability of tussar silk in the state. Many weavers are now eying Karnataka and other states producing Mulberry silk for their fabric. The weavers of the village earlier were using tussar silk extensively for their works. The villagers are also sourcing Mulberry silk from Malda in West Bengal. They, however, prefer the Karnataka silk for its superior quality.

“Tussar work is now declining in this village due to several reasons. Prime reasons include, surge in the prices of raw material and lack of accessibility to it. It (tussar silk) is now available at a rate of Rs 4,000/kg, while Mulberry silk is available at Rs 2,200/kg (from Malda, West Bengal) and Rs 3,600/kg (from Karnataka). We are now shifting to Mulberry silk as it is cheaper and easily accessible to us,” said Sarat Patra, a national award-wining weaver from the village. Sarat has been weaving since he was 10 years old.

Sarat also pointed out that the weavers of the village were hardly getting any benefit either from the government or the cooperatives and the NGOs supposed to work for the uplift of the weaving community.

The village with the potential to be part of rural tourism in a big way, meanwhile, is also facing other problems which are preventing it from flourishing. Although the village has direct road links with the state capital and Cuttack, many factors, such as not having a platform from which the weavers may sell their products, are proving a barrier to getting proper attention from the domestic and the foreign tourists.

“Several foreign and domestic tourists often flock to our village to see how clothes are woven from raw fabric. Recently, on April 11, around 20 foreigners visited our village as a part of their rural tourism. They stayed the whole day and minutely observed how much toil and time are required to create our products. However, we were embarrassed as we could not take care of them properly. The village which is often projected as part of rural tourism lacks adequate infrastructure to handle tourists. We do not have any dedicated public toilet, no public information centre, no accommodation for tourists. This is really dampening the prospects of the village, which has potential,” says Surendra Patra, another weaver from the village.

Patra meanwhile, is also disappointed due to the absence of any museum for the weavers at their village. Patra says he and other weavers from the village hardly get any platform to showcase their work to the visitors. Many villagers from the village also believe a dedicated museum in the village could really help them in storing and displaying their creations to the visitors more easily.

Another weaver, Prasant Dutt says, “The village is rich in its potential. Many weavers here toil hard to produce clothes. We often see many visitors flocking to our villages to see the whole process of cloth production and our final work. It would be a good initiative if the government installs solar panels in the village so that we can work in a cleaner environment and the whole village can be projected as a model village.”

Many villagers from the village, however, are buoyed by the response they get from tourists visiting their village. “We are overwhelmed by the response we garner from the visitors. Many a times we get better prices from them as they pay after seeing our work and no middlemen are involved. Unlike them, the showrooms in urban areas often delay our payments and make us suffer. We want the government to take some measures to boost tourism here so that we can benefit from the tourist inflow and sell our products directly from our village,” says a weaver on the condition on anonymity.

Tour operators from the state meanwhile, also complain that the non-availability of basic amenities often thwarts the inflow of visitors. “Rural tourism often gives platform to different stakeholders living in close proximity of the site to flourish. The artists, hotels nearby, shops in close proximity, transport providers and travel agents all get benefitted from this. However, absence of some basic amenities often proves as a hurdle to it. Rural tourism has huge potential, but it needs to be supported by the government,” says Sarat Acharya, founder of Bhubaneswar-based Discover Tour and Travels.

The government meanwhile, is planning to boost tourism at some of the weaving sites across the state by linking it to tourist sites nearby. The Directorate of Textiles and Handlooms recently wrote to the state tourism department to see how the textile and weaving villages of the state could be developed to boost rural tourism.

The Orissa Tourism Policy, which has been in effect now talks about developing local tourist sites for boosting tourism in the state. The policy which was published on April 17, 2013 also talks about developing and projecting local potential sites for tourism. It entrusted the local tourism promotion council and the district tourism promotion council with the duty to identify such potential sites and project and publicise it through several ways. The National Tourism Policy 2002 (in effect till now) also talks about boosting rural tourism to attract tourists from diverse places.

(Published in Orissa Post on April 24)

Homeopathy: Useful or useless

 By-Manish Kumar

(Published in Orissa Post Editorial Page on March 27)

Many staunch supporters of homeopathy in India were flummoxed a few days ago when a study by a reputed medical research body in Australia concluded that the more than 200-year-old system of alternative medicine is not effective in treating any medical condition. The Australian research body-National Health and Medicinal Research Council (NHMRC) even went ahead to state that homeopathy may put people’s health at risk if they delay treatment from trusted medicinal systems. The report sparked a fresh controversy in the medical fraternity in India. Many supporters wrote vehemently about the benefits of the system and how it helped them in the past. Many netizens too jumped onto the bandwagon of those who were discussing the burning issue.

Besides waves of disapproval of the system in Britain, Switzerland and Australia, the WHO too has indirectly attacked homeopathy as a system. WHO has already warned against using homeopathy for treating severe diseases like HIV and malaria. Nevertheless the famous campaign by Canadian-American scientific skeptic James Randi and 10:23 campaign group in UK January 2010 in the past had demonstrated the overdose of homeopathic medicines in public by taking excessive amounts of the medicine. By this they wanted to prove that it neither harms nor heals anything. The campaign spread to many countries across the globe including UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US.
Homeopathy was created in 1796 by German physicist Samuel Hahnemann based on the doctrine of ‘like cures’ which believed that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people will cure similar symptoms in sick people. The system is based on the concept of memory. By diluting these substances in water or alcohol, homeopaths claim the resulting mixture retains a memory of the original substance that triggers a healing response in the body.
The Australian report also says that while some studies do claim homeopathy was effective, the quality of those studies was said to be poor and suffered serious flaws in their design and did not have enough participants to support the idea that homeopathy worked better than a sugar pill.
However, in the case of India, homeopathy emerged as a good alternative to allopathy. Many streets in the country are flooded with several small and big homeopathy clinics. Many big brands too have jumped onto the bandwagon. In small cities too famous homeopathic doctors wield clout over large sections of patients.
The Central government meanwhile has been toiling hard to promote homeopathy and other forms of alternative medicines through several government interventions. A separate ministry christened Ministry of AYUSH was carved out to give importance to alternative medicines on November 9 last. Minister of State, AYUSH, Shripad Yesso Naik had many a time been seen clamouring in the two houses of Parliament about the government’s plan to promote the system. March 17 this year, in a written reply in Rajya Sabha, the MoS had informed the House that currently 52 universities across the country are offering different courses in homeopathy while the country is enriched with 2,79,518 registered homeopathic doctors.
The Centre has already constituted the Central Council of Homeopathy for regulation and education of the system. Government is now planning to open a new homeopathic institute in Shillong to extend the system to the north eastern part of the country. The Union government has already established the Central Council of Research in Homeopathy (CCRH) to conduct research in the subject.
Noteworthy, researches done by CCRH claim to have a positive role in decreasing viral load in HIV patients, in increasing CD4 count and improve quality of life of these people. This is in clear contradiction to the studies by the Australian and other global bodies and recommendations of WHO. Meanwhile, the Central government is planning to broaden the prospects of AYUSH and is extending financial supports to states/territories to providing infrastructure, finance, medicines to AYUSH institutions.
The government has also notified National AYUSH Mission to strengthen the system in the country during the 12th Five Year Plan. It will be worth watching if the country bends its policy after some global studies on the traditional system or will it wait for some more time to scrutinize the scenario itself.
It might be a good idea for the policy makers at the Centre to first do a detailed survey and study from grassroots levels to understand whether homeopathy really works. A major study could in fact contradict the findings of the major global studies. Moreover, in the growing era of digitization and database, it is of paramount importance to prepare a national database and evidence of effectiveness or ineffectiveness to understand the complexity of the homoepathic system on which many depend.
The row over the effectiveness of homeopathy is however not an alien topic for the globe. The use of the system got a major jolt in Britain when the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons in the country released a report in 2010 which found that treatments through homeopathy were ineffective. In June 2005, the Swiss government, after a five-year trial, withdrew insurance coverage for homeopathy and four other alternative medicine systems saying they did not meet efficacy standards. Experts believe the new Australian report could potentially harm the industry in Australia as it did in Switzerland and Britain. Many believe it can encourage the insurance firms to reduce the benefits covered under the system. However, a 2009 World Health Organization (WHO) review found Australians spending estimated $9.59 million on the industry alone which could be an indicator of why things are going the way they are.

What's the ART (Reguation) Bill 2010 offers

By-Manish Kumar 

(Published in Orissa Post Editorial page on March 23rd)

The recent confiscation of properties of an In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) clinic in Bhubaneswar has brought to light the mushrooming unregulated growth of assisted reproductive technology (ART) clinics in the state capital. Experts from the medical field opine that often these clinics flout norms framed by the National Guidelines for Accreditation, Supervision and Regulation of ART Clinics in India which have been in existence since 2005. Many blame it on the absence of any stringent legislation which can regulate these clinics across the country. According to rough estimates, these clinics number more than 2, 00,000 in India.
According to a UN-backed study in 2012, surrogacy itself accounts for $400million business in India, while civil society members claim to be more than double the estimated amount. This sector largely gets blurred as this business is legal in India yet highly unregulated, unaccredited and unsupervised. In 2008, the Gujarat high court, while hearing a case on surrogacy, had said that there is “extreme urgency to push through legislation” which addresses issues that arise out of surrogacy.
Lawmakers in the country however are pondering over a bill which can largely affect the ART clinics across the country and can potentially help in regulating, monitoring and supervising them. The bill christened as Assisted Reproductive Bill 2010 is yet to be cleared from Parliament and is now undergoing wider consultations among stakeholders. The draft bill discusses in detail the problems with the sector and also offers some solutions to this menace.
In order to regulate ART clinics, the draft bill talks about the establishment of a national advisory body, a state advisory body and a registration authority subordinate to the two bodies which can help in regulating, monitoring and supervising the industry. The bill empowers the national and state bodies to frame regulations to decide on the minimum staff at these ART clinics, permissible procedure, training, infrastructure, offences on cases of violation among others.
The most unique part of the bill is that it talks about fixing the age limit for ART and surrogacy between 21-45. It also restricts the number of kids of a surrogate to a maximum three. It also talks about rights of the kids and surrogates. Most prominent among these is the offences occurred under this could be treated as non-bailable, non-compoundable and cognizable. It plans to give the state advisory board powers of a civil court.
However, the bill hardly talks about the health and economic rights of surrogates. The bill only mentions that surrogates could be given monetary compensation and the expenditure on medical over pregnancy which will be borne by the genetic couple. It hardly talks about the minimum monetary benefit for the surrogate or about the post postpartum treatment required. This lacuna can potentially aid in exploiting the poor surrogates for money. The bill is still silent on what happens if the surrogate dies in the course of delivery.
The legislation has meanwhile given many superseding rights to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and has asked the ART clinics to supply all data to the ICMR for maintenance of records. This will surely help in maintaining the ART data nationally to get a correct picture of the business in India. However, India still has a National ART Registry of India, but experts say data pertaining to various dimensions related to ART lie-pregnancy rates, live births, and numbers of cycles are only voluntary to the doctors.
ART has proven to be a boon to many infertile couple. Many foreigners also use ART as they get the treatment comparatively cheap here. Law Commission has already termed surrogacy as a ‘gold spot’. It is a potential technology for boosting medical tourism in India. A strong legislation dealing with different dimensions of the subject can help boost the treatment and also ensure that it is meanwhile regulated to ensure quality and standards and safeguard the interests of people involved in the process.
Union minister of state for health and family welfare, Shripad Yesso Naik, has stated in a written reply to Rajya Sabha March 10 that ICMR is revising the ART (Regulation) Bill based on comments it garnered through several experts. Some ministries and departments have already submitted their comments on the bill. Hope is that the bill gets passed as soon as possible so that the welfare of all involved is secured.