What price of Indian independence? Greenpeace under the spotlight Barry Brook | 25 May 2011

What price of Indian independence? Greenpeace under the spotlight Barry Brook | 25 May 2011URL: http://wp.me/piCIJ-1cU

Two PWRs under construction in Kudamkulam, India

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. To see a list of other BNC posts by Geoff, click here.
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India declared itself a republic in 1950 after more than a century of struggle against British Imperialism. Greenpeace India however, is still locked firmly under the yoke of its parent. Let me explain.
Like many Australians, I only caught up with Bombay's 1995 change of name to Mumbai some time after it happened. Mumbai is India's city of finance and film, of banks and Bollywood. A huge seething coastal metropolis on the north western side of India. It's also the capital of the state of Maharashtra which is about 20 percent bigger than the Australian state of Victoria, but has 112 million people compared to Victoria's 5.5 million. Mumbai alone has over double Victoria's entire population. Despite its population, the electricity served up by Maharashtra's fossil fuel power stations plus one big hydro scheme is just 11.3 GW (giga watts, see Note 3), not much more than the 8 or so GW of Victoria's coal and gas fumers. So despite Mumbai's dazzling glass and concrete skyline, many Indians in both rural and urban areas of the state still cook with biomass ... things like wood, charcoal and cattle dung.

The modern Mumbai skyline at night

Mumbai's wealth is a magnet for terrorism. The recent attacks in 2008 which killed 173 follow bombings in 2003 and 1993 which took 209 and 257 lives respectively. Such events are International news, unlike the daily death and illness, particularly to children, from cooking with biomass. Each year, cooking smoke kills about 256,000 Indian children between 1 and 5 years of age with acute lower respiratory infections (ALRI). Those who don't die can suffer long term consequences to their physical and mental health. A rough pro-rata estimate would see about 23,000 children under 5 die in Maharashtra every year from cooking smoke.
The image is from a presentation by medical Professor Kirk Smith, who has been studying cooking smoke and its implications for 30 years.

Medical Prof. Kirk Smith's summary of health impacts from cooking fires

The gizmo under the women's right arm measures the noxious fumes she is exposed to while cooking. Kirk doesn't just study these illnesses but has been spinning off development projects which develope and distribute cleaner cooking stoves to serve as an interim measure until electricity arrives.
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