A round-up of recent work: Let’s Buy Afghan Dope, a nearly baked proposal that proved popular with readers at the International Herald Tribune, and was later echoed by Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation; A Hunger Artist, on the cynicism of India’s belt-waving “Gandhian” savior, Anna Hazare; two pieces on the hunger strikes of the scientist-turned-swami GD Agrawal; a brief update on the Kony 2012 campaign; in India, skin-whitening reaches below the belt; in Egypt, the undead lunged for the presidency (only to later be disqualified).

More soon.

This piece first appeared at National Geographic, and was updated Saturday night.

G.D. Agrawal is determined to die.

“At the moment I am quite resigned to my fate,” Agrawal, the 80-year-old dean of India’s environmental engineers, tells me by phone from his hospital bed in the holy city of Varanasi.

Agrawal hasn’t eaten since February 8. He hasn’t taken a drink of water since March 8; an intravenous drip of dextrose and vitamins keeps him lucid.

GD Agrawal, the environmental engineer also known as Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand, at the Varanasi hospital where he is on a hunger strike. Agrawal says he will remove his IV tube on Saturday. "At the moment I am quite resigned to my fate," he told Nat Geo News Watch.

At 5 pm Saturday, Agrawal says, he will pull those tubes from his arms, his next – and maybe last – escalation in a years-long battle to force the Indian government to honor its promises to protect the Ganges River.

The 1,569-mile holy river is increasingly choked by dams, drained by irrigation canals, and fouled by industrial, agricultural, and human waste. Since 2008, Agrawal has engaged in four hunger strikes seeking to prevent the construction of hydroelectric dams on the Ganges’ Himalayan source rivers.

His devotion to the river is more than scientific. Last summer, Agrawal, a former chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, renounced the material world and became a swami. He is now known by his disciples as Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand. Agrawal is a national figure, and he’s won concessions in the past.

In July 2010, when the Indian government decided to resume work on several hydroelectric plants on the Bhagirathi River, Agrawal went without food for 34 days before the government, represented by Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, agreed to cancel dam projects on the river’s upper reaches. Despite these and other successes, the condition of the river continues to deteriorate. An estimated 90 percent of its flow is diverted into irrigation canals and to meeting the water needs of the fast-growing New Delhi capital region.

Agrawal and his supporters say a national body created in 2008 to safeguard Hinduism’s holiest river has been a sham. The National Ganga River Basin Authority has met only twice in three years, and not at all since November 2010. On March 9, board members Rajendra Singh, a Magsaysay Award winner for his work on protecting freshwater resources, Ravi Chopra of the People’s Science Institute, and environmentalist Rashid Hayat Siddiqui resigned from the authority in solidarity with Agrawal. The government body has cost $1.19 billion during its short life, “but we do not have any details about how the money is being used…There is no accountability,” Singh told The Hindu newspaper. Agrawal and the others want a real commitment from the government to protect the Ganges. So far, they say, they’ve received nothing but half-promises.

This week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh dispatched the coal minister, Sriprakash Jaiswal, to ask Agrawal to stop his fast. Jaiswal left empty handed. “There are a few options that I am willing to give them,” Agrawal told me: Call an immediate meeting of the river authority to formulate plans for effective regulations, or call an immediate halt to upstream dam projects. “So far, there’s been no significant response,” he says.

If Agrawal goes through with his promise to remove his intravenous line, it’s almost certain police will restrain and feed him through an IV drip or a nasal feeding tube. “It depends on how much force they want to use,” he says. “I am not willing to go on like this.” Last year a young swami called Nigamanand died after an epic fast to stop illegal mining of the Ganges riverbed in the northern city of Haridwar. (His comrades insist, somewhat persuasively, that he died not of malnutrition but that he was poisoned by local mining interests.) Nigamanand’s leader, Swami Shivanand, has also engaged in several fasts to protect the river.

This activism isn’t taking place in a vacuum of good deeds (or bad ones). Bolstered by a $1 billion loan from the World Bank, the Indian government recently started a new Ganges clean-up plan. As I mentioned in this piece, this good faith plan teems with expensive lessons learned. It’s obvious that it will take more than a few men starving themselves to death to preserve the Ganges. The question is, why should it require any?

[UPDATE, 9:45 pm Saturday, Indian Standard Time: According to Govind Sharma, secretary of the Ganga Mahasabha organization in Varanasi, Professor Agrawal has removed his intravenous line against the advice of his doctors and is now resting in his hospital bed and reading Hindu scriptures. He has not as of this writing been forced to re-insert the intravenous line, although there is still a possibility that the Varanasi district administration could apply for a court's permission to force feed him.]

GD Agrawal, after removing his intravenous line.

When Franklin Roosevelt appointed the business titan and former bootlegger Joseph Kennedy to head his new Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, the U.S. president famously bragged that he had “set a thief to catch a thief.” If India’s politicians follow this strategy, its most populous state will be crime-free in no time.

At least ten state assembly candidates in Uttar Pradesh are presently in jail awaiting trial on charges that include murder and racketeering. In the current assembly, 139 out of 404 legislators are free while facing criminal charges.

My latest, “In Indian Politics, Crime Pays,” is up at the New York Times/International Herald Tribune.

Two recent pieces for the New York Times/International Herald Tribune‘s Latitude blog:

India’s Political Blasphemy, on the Salman Rushdie affair earlier this month at the Jaipur Literary Festival.

Come Hell With High Water, on Bangladesh’s approach to global climate change.

Next up: India’s gangster parliamentarians.

This post first appeared at National Geographic, and references “Feral Cats and Social Indicators”, my latest piece at The New York Times’ Latitude blog

The photo you see above is of an adorable stray cat that’s living like a squatter at Bangladesh’s biggest children’s hospital.

The kitty could be called adorable, if a little standoffish. It’s also something of a scourge: Cats shouldn’t be allowed to roam the open halls and wards of a hospital, certainly not one treating vulnerable newborns.

My most recent piece for the New York Times’ Latitude blog looks at a terrible attack that one such stray made on a six-day-old infant, and how such incidents deflect attention from the strong gains Bangladesh is making in terms of health and development.

The steady social progress of countries like Bangladesh is often unnoticed by visitors and short-time expatriates. We see much of what’s obviously wrong, but we often lack the perspective to compare today’s conditions with the 1970s and 80s — when most Bangladeshis, Indians, and Pakistanis were born. (Another perspective we’re missing is the rural one: With the exception of a few foreign aid workers, missionaries, and academics, not many outsiders have anything close to a feel for life outside the cities – where most Bangladeshis, Indians, and Pakistanis actually live.)

It’s a point I hear a lot when speaking with my colleagues in India and Bangladesh. These are hard-core public-service journalists who make their careers exposing the human costs of corruption, prejudice, and bad governance. In private, however, they’re anything but pessimistic about the ultimate trajectory of their respective countries.

Here’s a sample from my Times piece:

Last month there was an extraordinary attack at the Dhaka Children’s Hospital. One of the dozens of stray cats that call the hospital home reportedly walked into a neonatal ward, mounted a bed where a six-day-old girl was receiving phototherapy treatment for jaundice and tried to take her as prey. According to the Daily Star, the cat had pulled the newborn off her bed and onto the floor, and dragged her partway to the ward’s open door before anyone noticed.

Not unlike Bangladesh itself, this 500-bed pediatric hospital provides the setting for both eye-popping outrages against human dignity and also unheralded social progress. Over the last two decades, Bangladesh’s poverty rate has fallen from 59 percent to 40 percent. The country remains a hard place to live in, but on most days its people successfully navigate a minefield of destitution, corruption, ignorance and maladministration. It’s when they don’t that we read about it in the newspapers.

A version of this post first appeared at National Geographic, and references my piece, Grunge on the Ganges, at The New York Times’ Latitude blog.

Varanasi, India — A couple years ago, one of India’s leading industrial houses announced a revolutionary new household filter that would for the first time bring affordable, safe drinking water to millions of homes. The Tata Swach combines the inexpensive carbon of burnt rice husks with silver nano-particles to kill and remove deadly microbes including cholera, E coli, and the rotavirus.

The Swach doesn’t need electricity or running water. Unlike some filters sold in the United States, the Swatch’s filter bulb cuts off the flow of water when it’s exhausted, meaning it’s impossible to drink unclean water that’s passed through a spent filter. (There’s no risk in drinking unfiltered water in New York or Denver, but it’s a different story in India, where waterborne diseases kill as many as half a million children each year.)

And it’s hugely affordable: The unit costs less than $20 and monthly filter replacements are just $7.

More than a million of these filters have been sold since 2009, and it’s not hard to imagine the public health benefits that will follow. More Indian companies are jumping into the low-cost filter business, which could push prices even lower.

This Indian success story, however, can also be seen as a thin bit of cover for the country’s scandalously poor public services.

In the West, there is often a suspicion of municipal water. In my hometown, families spend good money to filter water that’s rigorously tested each day. Even worse, they pay for bottled water that often comes from the same city mains as the local tap water.

Indians need to filter and boil their water because the stuff their government sends them is often poisonous. This was driven home last month when, during a seven-day boat journey down the Ganges, I came across a jaw-dropping sight: A sewage pipe pouring waste into the river just upstream of a water pumping station that in turn sent the dirty water right back into people’s homes.

With no one else looking out for their health, individual households take on the burden and financial cost of what is clearly one of the basic jobs of government.

William Nanda Bissell, in his 2010 book “Making India Work,” describes the economic activity generated by these gaps in governance as “forced consumption.” The money Tata and other companies earn from innovations like the Swach is money that Indian families could have saved or spent on education, housing, health care or, God forbid, culture and entertainment. The massive investment required to deliver clean water to Indian households is still less than the total amount being spent by hundreds of millions of families to do the job at home –- and of the work and school hours and health expenses lost to waterborne diseases.

According to a new report by the Delhi-based Center for Science and the Environment, India’s cities are drowning in their own waste due to poor planning and administration. “Every city was the same old story,” Souparno Banerjee, lead researcher on the 3 ½ year effort, told the Wall Street Journal. “It had devastated its surface water, it was depleting its ground water and it had no plan for managing its water or wastewater.”

Speaking with the Journal, the Center’s director, Sunita Narain, asks some disturbing questions:

“Is it a reflection of the caste system of Indian society, where removing waste was someone else’s business? The business was untouchable. Certainly it was unspeakable. Or is it a reflection of the current governance systems, where water and waste are government business and, within that, it is the sole business of a lowly water and sanitation bureaucracy?”

“Or is it simply a reflection of Indian society’s extreme arrogance — our belief we can fix it all as and when we get rich?”

Dan Morrison is a journalist and author of The Black Nile.

Satellite images of the effects of quarrying on the Ganges near Haridwar between 2003 and 2010. Image courtesy Matri Sadan ashram.

This post first appeared at National Geographic News Watch, and references “A Sacred River Under Assault,” which ran on the New York Times/International Herald Tribune’s Latitude blog on December 8. My first contribution to the NYT/IHT Opinion section, “A Dam’s Unexpected Winners,” appeared November 25.

An 11-day hunger strike by the swami of a small ashram ended on Monday night when the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand banned stone and sand mining from the Ganges riverbed near the city of Haridwar pending an environmental impact statement.

Officials slid the written order under the bolted door of a room of the Matri Sadan ashram, where 65-year-old Swami Shivanand had barricaded himself to prevent his arrest on charges of attempted suicide.

Shivanand read the order, unlocked the door, and broke his fast with glasses of lemon water and apple juice. This fast was Shivanand’s sixth. The longest, in 2000, was 21 days.

Shivanand and his followers have been fighting since 1998 to defend the Ganges from the effects of mining. Their environmental cause is driven by a spiritual imperative.

Quarrying from the Ganges riverbed is a big business, one that appears to have infected the local government and law enforcement. Shivanand and his followers (“saints” in local parlance) have endured years of false arrests and assaults aimed at stopping their advocacy.

For example, here’s a link to a video provided to me by the Matri Sadan from 2009. It shows a 20-year-old hunger-striker named Yajnanand as he is abducted by masked men. Local officials had come to the ashram with the stated purpose of having the young monk’s condition assessed by a doctor. Instead, the video shows, men in balaclavas emerge from behind the trees and drag him away. (The first three and a half minutes are shaky and extraneous; the abduction begins around the 10:45 mark.)

Yajnanand was jailed for two months and force-fed through a nasal tube until a court ordered his release on grounds that he’d been illegally detained.

I first met Swami Shivanand last June, following the death of a senior member of the ashram. Swami Nigamanand, 38, had died after a 68-day fast. India’s Central Bureau of Investigation is investigating if he was poisoned in his hospital bed by the state’s so-called “mining mafia.” A medical report lists “organophosphate poisoning” – pesticides, in other words, as a possible cause of death. (In 2003, another member of the ashram, Swami Gokulanand, was killed with an injection of scoline, a pre-anesthetic drug, while keeping vigil against developers in the Nainital forest.)

Swami Shivanand, photo by Dan Morrison

A May 26 ruling by the state’s High Court shut down the operation that Nigamanand had been protesting. By that time, he was already in a coma. The court’s decision spelled out the damage mining has done to the Ganges and surrounding farmlands.

According to the High Court, the mining and stone crushing, which feeds the state’s construction industry, had made barren more than a million acres of farmland and orchards. By digging into the Ganges riverbed, the miners had lowered the water table to such an extent that irrigation wells and drinking water pumps had all gone dry.

On November 1, the state green-lighted mining on two nearby stretches of the river. An outraged Shivanand began his fast November 25. Having met him and his single-minded followers, I have no doubt he might have taken the hunger strike to the brink of death, if not beyond.

“The quality of a saint is to be brave, to be fearless,” Shivanand told me. “A saint can make the other world tremble.”

Three sacred rivers meet at Allahabad: The Ganges, born of clear Himalayan tributaries that first trickle and then rage down from India’s border with Tibet; its sister, the Yamuna, which shadows the Ganges to the west before curving past Delhi and the Taj Mahal to join her; and the mythical Saraswati, ancient and invisible, which is said to run beneath the earth.

Only the Saraswati reaches Allahabad in a pristine state.

My latest, at National Geographic.

A fake Dior bag, even one you know is fake, can still provide a little pleasure. Why? It looks nice. And it holds within it the comfort of the familiar and the aspired-to.

This first occurred to me last year, thousands of miles from Dior’s Paris and New York’s Chinatown, when I laid eyes on Bangladesh’s fake Taj Mahal.

The fake Taj is a tribute to a tribute. A souvenir snow globe for a country that has never seen snow.

Bangladesh is starving for entertainment. The perspiring capital, Dhaka, is home to a couple dreadful amusement parks that cater to the rich, a dreadful zoo where the poor animals keep dying and a number of old-fashioned movie halls that middle-class people won’t be caught dead visiting because of their reputation as masturbatoriums.

The city’s lovely botanical garden is one of only a few parks and developers are planning to bisect it with a slurry pipeline so they can fill a nearby riverbank and build apartment towers.

There isn’t much to do when the day’s labors are finished but watch TV, play cricket and gossip.

The boredom has grown worse in the last decade as Bangladesh’s economy has taken off, depositing new spending money in the pockets of millions of people who previously couldn’t spare a cent.

Into this vacuum stepped film producer Ahsanullah Moni, a silver-tongued captain of industry and illusion. In 2008, newswires on four continents lit up with the story that Moni was building a replica of the Taj Mahal on a plot of farmland outside Dhaka.

The real Taj Mahal, of course, resides 800 miles and one trigger-happy border away, in the north Indian town of Agra. The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built it as a mausoleum for one of his wives, the empress Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their 14th child. It took 20,000 workers more than 20 years to complete the original Taj Mahal.

Ahsanullah Moni didn’t have that kind of time or manpower.

His Taj would be built using modern methods and cost $58 million, reported a raft of credulous foreign publications, including The Times of London, Reuters, the BBC, and the Guardian. The marble, from Italy, would be of a quality surpassing that of its inspiration, Moni bragged. Critics complained of the price tag. The Indian embassy made peevish noises about copyright infringement. And the story faded from view.

Last year, accompanied by Schon Bryan, my boon companion in the book The Black Nile, I took a drive through Dhaka’s apocalyptic traffic, past hazy green fields of rice paddy, into the countryside district of Sonargaon to see Moni’s Taj.

And it was lovely.

It was no less lovely for looking nothing like the real Taj Mahal. In size and proportion the attraction bears only a slight resemblance to the Indian wonder, as if made from a sketch or a decade-old memory. It might have cost $58,000 to build.

The central structure and its four minarets were obviously clad in bathroom tiles, some in floral patterns of pink, amber, and lilac. The Belgian diamonds Moni had spoken of had apparently been replaced by plastic. Inside, where, in the real Taj, women pray over the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal, was a raw chamber filled with construction debris.

It didn’t matter.

“How am I supposed to see the real Taj Mahal?” asked Shahidul Haque, 40-year-old a truck driver. “It would cost a fortune to fly my family to India, and we’d never get visas anyway.”

“I’ve seen pictures of the Indian Taj, and this is pretty close,” Haque added. “We’re a poor country.”

Moni, however, is blind to the project’s shortcomings, insisting that “It is a 100 percent accurate replica.”

The man has more than a little P.T. Barnum in him, not to mention Frederic Thompson and Elmer “Skip” Dundy, the early 20th-Century founders of Coney Island’s Luna Park.

Back in Dhaka, he gave Schon and me a tour of the movie theater that doubles as his headquarters and production studio. A Shah Jahan biopic was in the works, he said, to be filmed on location at the new Taj and in the theater’s basement, which had been painted pink for the bedroom scenes.

But the Taj was just the beginning. “I want a complex,” Moni said, pointing us to models of a three-sided pyramid and a giant duck that would one day stand beside the porcelain monument in Sonargaon.

A veteran of Bangladesh’s bloody 1971 war of independence, Moni is a patriot whose desk holds a photo-shopped picture of himself standing with the country’s founding father. He is intimately familiar with the fantasies of his people.

“I will build a pyramid bigger than the one in Egypt,” Moni said with a grin. “It will be my next gift to Bangladesh.”

—
Dan Morrison’s reporting has taken him from BBQs with the Latin Kings street gang to ride-alongs with the police assassins of Bombay. He is author of The Black Nile, an account of his 3,600-mile journey down the Nile River through Uganda, Sudan, and Egypt, published by Viking Penguin.

(This piece first appeared in the Huffington Post on August 21.)