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.

Burning marshland, South Sudan, 2007. Photo by Dan Morrison.

This piece first appeared at National Geographic.

An obscure indie-rock b-side kept running through my head last January as I hopped from city to city reporting on South Sudan’s freedom referendum.

The song was Two States, by the band Pavement. The words were simple, the music jaunty and driven.

Two states. We want two states.

North and south. Two states.

Forty million barrels!

Forty million barrels!

The lyrics seemed shockingly, if accidentally, appropriate to the break-up of Africa’s biggest country, and the high-stakes competition for the valuable oil located on Sudan’s contested north-south border. I grinned as the song persisted during my travels in Khartoum, Malakal, and Juba. After decades of civil war and life as second-class citizens, more than 98 percent of southern voters chose to leave Sudan and become masters of their own destinies.

But the chorus I recalled was wrong, misheard many years ago and never corrected.

The accurate chorus, tragically, is perhaps more fitting to the independent Republic of South Sudan than those I had imagined. It goes:

Forty million daggers!

Forty million daggers!

South Sudan is at war with itself. Or its tribes are at war with one another. In Jonglei state as many as a thousand members of the Murle tribe were massacred this month by members of the Lou Nuer. As Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times notes in this vivid and sad piece from the overrun city of Pibor, the bloodshed was revenge by the Nuer for raids by the Murle last August – less than a month after South Sudan became independent – in which 600 Nuer were killed, scores of children stolen, and untold heads of cattle seized.

South Sudan’s tribes have been raiding cattle (and people) from one another for hundreds of years. Cows are money, and prestige, and also something deeper. The young boys who guard the south’s massive cattle camps are deeply familiar with their bovine wards. One boy will be able to recognize each individual cow in a herd of hundreds – and will recall each one by name.

These raids took on a more deadly character in the late 1980s with the introduction of automatic weapons from Sudan’s north-south civil war. Raids that once involved spears and shields were now prosecuted with Kalashnikovs and sometimes even rocket-propelled grenades.

Counting votes in South Sudan's freedom referendum, January 16, 2011. Photo by Dan Morrison

This mutation, or adaptation, was exemplified by the White Army, a giant force of Nuer (and some Dinka) fighters that first emerged to defend community property from outsiders and later became akin to a self-sustaining and independent fighting machine.

As the veteran Sudan researcher John Young notes in a 2007 study of the White Army, “…in contrast to similar [armed] groups in other areas its members became active participants in the civil war. Moreover, while most local armed groups remained under community control, the white army increasingly became an independent force that was at times highly destructive of the community from which it emerged.”

After Sudan’s civil war ended in 2005, southern leaders shut down the White Army in fighting that left at least 600 dead. Members of the Muele tribe located in southern Jonglei state were quick to exploit the power vacuum. They began raids that have continued on and off since 2006.

The Murle have a reputation has fierce, hard-core fighters. “They will eat dirt,” and go without water for days in the search for cattle to steal, a United Nations official once told me. The Nuer, of course, are also quite martial, and far more numerous. In fact, it was reportedly a reconstituted White Army that invaded Pibor this month. Muerle revenge attacks (for the Nuer revenge attacks) are already underway.

So where does the bloodshed end?

When, and how, do a proud and independent people agree to change?

Is there a model anywhere, any example, of armed pastoralists giving up the more destructive aspects of their culture and at the same time maintaining – or being permitted to maintain – their way of life?

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.

It’s strange when someone you’ve seen up close, even for just a few hours, gets killed. Even when they were terrible and had it coming. You see that grey-skinned person bleeding, sagging, disoriented, afraid in the mob, and later you see him dead and stripped.

In the back of your mind you always knew this is where those great Amazon discounts came from: Desperate workers, including pregnant women, passing out in stifling 110-degree warehouses, some of them required to sort or pack a different item every 30 seconds over a 10-hour shift.

The Allentown Morning call, a small newspaper in the Tribune chain that has been pummeled at least as bad as its better-known sisters, has a depressing and revealing look at life inside an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. It will make you pause next time your mouse hovers above Amazon’s “Buy Now” button. Here’s the top:

Allentown, Pa.—

Elmer Goris spent a year working in Amazon.com‘s Lehigh Valley warehouse, where books, CDs and various other products are packed and shipped to customers who order from the world’s largest online retailer.

The 34-year-old Allentown resident, who has worked in warehouses for more than 10 years, said he quit in July because he was frustrated with the heat and demands that he work mandatory overtime. Working conditions at the warehouse got worse earlier this year, especially during summer heat waves when heat in the warehouse soared above 100 degrees, he said.

He got light-headed, he said, and his legs cramped, symptoms he never experienced in previous warehouse jobs. One hot day, Goris said, he saw a co-worker pass out at the water fountain. On other hot days, he saw paramedics bring people out of the warehouse in wheelchairs and on stretchers.”I never felt like passing out in a warehouse and I never felt treated like a piece of crap in any other warehouse but this one,” Goris said. “They can do that because there aren’t any jobs in the area.” [My emphasis, as if it were necessary.]

It’s a long and instructive read about what people will try to endure when they’re desperate for work, and what companies will do when they know the workforce is desperate. In this case, it appears a temporary labor agency dangled the promise of permanent employment  Amazon to get people into its warehouses and then fired them when they began to show signs of injury or fatigue. Very very few workers were ever taken on by Amazon. It appears that hundreds busted their guts and then were let go, often for capricious reasons.

The story is full of examples of general corporate heartlessness, but I want to highlight this one: A worker in his 50′s told reporter Spencer Soper that his job required him to spend much of the day on his hands and knees.

The warehouse is organized like a library. Bins labeled “A” were on the floor. Dim lighting in the warehouse in which he worked made it difficult for him to find items stored in the low bins, especially novels with script titles or CDs with small writing, he said. Often, he got on his hands and knees to find things in the low bin, and would crawl to other bins rather than continuously stoop and stand, he said.

“The worst part was getting on my hands and knees 250 to 300 times a day,” he said.

This recalled to me Vanity Fair’s July 2008 oral history of the Internet, and this anecdote from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:

Jeff Bezos: When we started out, we were packing on our hands and knees on these cement floors. One of the software engineers that I was packing next to was saying, You know, this is really killing my knees and my back. And I said to this person, I just had a great idea. We should get kneepads. And he looked at me like I was from Mars. And he said, Jeff, we should get packing tables.

We got packing tables the next day, and it doubled our productivity.

If the world’s biggest online retailer can’t afford tables for the workers in Pennsylvania, or air-conditioning for that matter, the least if could do is spare them some knee pads.

Lest you think that the workers Soper interviewed are simple malingerers who couldn’t handle the pace of blue-collar work, he makes a point of speaking to an employment agent who places workers in other local warehouses.

But one staffing industry recruiter whose company serves the Lehigh Valley shipping industry said he has interviewed roughly 40 job applicants who complained of difficult working conditions at the Amazon warehouse. Ordinarily, if someone only lasted a few months in a warehouse job, it would raise questions about their abilities, he said. But he has placed former Amazon warehouse workers in other warehouse jobs and they were able to meet expectations, he said.

“A lot of places spend time and money to make something ergonomically designed so that the average person can do the work. They don’t have to be a professional athlete to do the work,” he said.

I bet the people at Powell’s get benefits. Hell, I bet they’re even in a union.

Forget Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot unraveling the deadly mendacities of a steamer full of wealthy foreign tourists. Divorce your gaze from the spray-tanned Elizabeth Taylor and her cast of genuflecting thousands. For a cinematic glimpse of what life was like along the Nile in the glorious old and not-so-old days, check out these overlooked classics of exploration, identity, betrayal, and fear on the world’s longest river. (A video slideshow at the Huffington Post.)