Two very different reports from my visit to the recently-concluded Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India, where tens of millions of pilgrims immersed themselves at the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and (invisible) Saraswati rivers. For the New York Times, I looked at how India was able to eliminate of polio, using the Kumbh as a backdrop for this massive public health effort. And at Artforum, I looked at how artists approach this biggest of human gatherings. More soon.

Three from the NatGeo blog: On the trail of endangered pangolins from Africa to restaurants in China; wrestling as peacebuilding in South Sudan; and an unprecedented scientific investigation into neonatal death in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

I wrote in the New York Times a few months ago about the takeover of the Gandhian Institute of Studies in Varanasi, India, by a clique of so-called “academics” tied to the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The RSS, a paramilitary organization with an estimated 5 million members, “actually was the inspiration and source of the Kill Gandhi and Hate Gandhi movement” that led to Gandhi’s assassination, according to Tushar Gandhi, a great-grandson of the Mahatma.

It’s ironic, Tushar told me, that the RSS “is attempting to grab an institution founded by Ram Manohar Lohia, a eminent follower of Gandhi and one of India’s leading socialist leaders.”

Now comes news that the grounds of the Gandhian Institute have recently been used to host a meeting of RSS leaders. Clips (in Hindi) after the jump.

It’s a world of fakes and charlatans — they’re in every city in every country. But still: The Gall.

Aid organizations have long struggled with the issue of how to get donors engaged. Faced with the choice of making supporters feel they’re singlehandedly saving the world versus showering them with administrative details about vaccines, food, and emergency tarps, it’s not surprising many choose to emphasize the individual, be it your individual contribution, a single (usually famous) interlocutor, ala Nicholas Kristof or Angelina Jolie, or individual beneficiaries. People want to feel connected.

My latest, at Huffington Post.

Two from Bihar, India’s poorest state, where the newspapers talk of a turnaround and the people keep watch for ruling party thugs. A Final Interview with Brahmeshwar Nath Singh, for the New York Times, looks at a high-caste militia leader, implicated in the murders of nearly 300 landless peasants. Brahmeshwar Singh was assassinated a few days after I spoke with him last summer. The Dark Side of India’s Mr. Clean, for Al Jazeera, explores the political realities that bind a genuine reformist politician to local despots and gangsters.

Swami Shivanand of the Matri Sadan ashram in Haridwar, India, breaks a 36-day fast to protect the Ganges River.

Details to come. I first wrote about Shivanand and his band of dedicated and embattled saints last December for National Geographic ( http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2011/12/09/a-swamis-hunger-strike-ends-mining-on-a-stretch-of-the-ganges-river/ ) and the New York Times ( http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/a-sacred-river-under-assault/ — http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/indias-anticorruption-guru-anna-hazare-is-a-hunger-strike-opportunist/ ).

Shivanand is fearless, and says he’s not afraid of death. Just the same, I am very glad he’s alive.

The Great Indian Outage, stretching from New Delhi to Kolkata, comes just a day after 300 million people in northern India lost power for much of Monday.

It is a disaster that’s caused untold damage to India’s economy, its prestige, and its well-being – think of the millions of patients in hospitals, the commuters stuck on trains, and farmers in need of irrigation. Hundreds of miners in the states of West Bengal and Jharkand were trapped underground by the blackout. Some 300 trains were reportedly stalled across the country.

There’s more damage to come, I fear: Forces that have been bridling against environmental regulations and science-based activism will use the Great Outage as a cudgel to demolish future restraints on dam construction, coal mining, and other projects.

India’s humiliating power failure is sure to birth a slogan as reductive and wrong as America’s own “Drill Baby Drill.”

The north Indian town of New Tehri, built above the reservoir of a 1,000-megawatt dam to house displaced villagers, suffers daily power outages.

The irony is that this outage was likely caused in part by mismanagement at the Bhakra series of hydroelectric dams in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh states in northern India, according to Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People.

“Had these dams been operated more rationally, keeping in mind the emerging realities and forecasts, the situation in Northwest India would have been different,” Thakkar told me. “Higher [water] levels in these dams would have meant more power generation for each unit of water release and at the same time more water for agriculture, thus less water [for irrigation] pumped from aquifers, and thus less demand of power.”

Earlier this month, Thakkar’s organization published a short paper [pdf] criticizing dam administrators for allowing water levels to become alarmingly low.

Thakkar says the answer to India’s current power crisis isn’t more hydroelectric dams, as most currently existing dams aren’t built or operated for maximum efficiency. Instead, power can be saved by harvesting rainwater.

“Since most of our water is coming from groundwater, we need to store the rainfall in aquifers that are fast depleting,” he says. “This would have multiple spin-off benefits.” With healthier aquifers, farmers wouldn’t have to run electric-powered pumps as much to adequately irrigate their crops – a major drag on the power grid.

“More dams won’t help achieve that,” Thakkar says, adding that farmers should shift to less water-intensive crops. “It is amazing that, among all the crops, [acreage devoted to] sugarcane has gone up in this drought year!”

At the Center for Science and the Environment, Chandra Bushan provides some of the hard numbers behind today’s blackout, as well as a simple cause: Indian states are taking more power from the grid than they are supposed to, even as the power system lacks the flexibility to meet seasonal spikes in demand.

In this case, a weak and tardy annual monsoon has millions of households and businesses running their air conditioners for longer than they would under normal conditions. This from the CSE:

Electricity generation for the month of June illustrates this problem:

• In June 2012, India produced 8 per cent more electricity than in June 2011.
• The generation from thermal power plants was 11.4 per cent higher than in June 2011. Coal-based power plants generated 16.7 per cent more electricity.
• However, with low monsoon, the generation of electricity from hydropower plants reduced by 6 per cent compared to June 2011. In fact, hydropower plants produced 19 per cent lesser electricity in April-June, 2012 than the corresponding months in 2011. As hydro plants are also peak load plants, this reduction seems to have affected the peak power generation in the country significantly.

None of this logic – nor the many recent plans and ideas for improving the management and efficiency of India’s power grid – will make a difference to the contractors and bureaucrats in the “Build Baby Build” crowd that has much to gain from poorly-planned dam construction.

The scientist and environmentalist G.D. Agrawal, who now goes by the name Swami Gyan Swarup Anand. Photo by Dan Morrison.

The debate over dams has become so silly that earlier this month a minister from the government of Uttarakhand state went on a one-day hunger strike to support more construction on the Himalayan tributaries of the Ganges River. Mantri Prasad Naithani’s constituency is in the region of Tehri Gahrwal, which was submerged a decade ago by the giant Tehri dam. Residents of the doomed town of Tehri were relocated to a “model town” higher up the valley to make room for the $1 billion, 1,000 megawatt hydroelectric dam’s reservoir.

When I visited New Tehri last year, power outages were commonplace.

But it’s brute force, not the rhetorical kind, that truly keeps this movement alive.

On June 22, the Indian environmentalist Bharat Jhunjhunwala was attacked in his home in Uttarakhand state by a gang of 40 thugs purportedly working for a contracting company. At the time of the attack, Jhunjhunwala, 62, had been hosting G.D. Agrawal, an eminent scientist turned swami who is also known as Gyan Swarup Anand. Agrawal was in the region to protest the coming submergence of the Dhari Devi Temple on the Alaknanda river by a hydroelectric project.

In full view of local police and journalists, the crowd kicked in Jhunjhunwalla’s door and blackened his face with ink. He and his wife were forced to flee the area.

“They threatened him that they will burn him alive in the house if he did not stop opposing the dams within two days,” according to an account by Jhunjhunwala’s family.

India’s power grid suffers from inertia on one hand and from destructive greed on the other. It doesn’t suffer from a shortage of dams.

* The correct number is closer to 323 million.

This post first appeared at NatGeo NewsWatch.

PATNA, India – Perched high on a rooftop amid the pollution and noise of a vibrant Indian city, a new kind of superhero listens for signs of the enemy.

His ears tuned to an array of elaborately curved trumpets, Bulgam Bhai strains to hear the ever-present danger and then pounces. When an Indian coughs, this jocular public health avenger — all candy stripes and waxed mustache –- appears in a flash with a potentially life-saving question:

“Has it been two weeks?”

A persistent cough of more than two weeks can indicate tuberculosis. An estimated 330,000 Indians die each year from TB, according to the World Health Organization, and more than 2 million become infected.

Bulgam Bhai –- his appetizing name means Mr. Sputum in Hindi –- is part of a delightful public service campaign to convince more Indians to visit a clinic or lab if their coughs turn pernicious.

Most cases of tuberculosis are easily curable. Bulgam Bhai’s goal is to spread word f the ready availability of testing and treatment, says Dr. Sarabjit Chadha, project director at Project Axshya which, along with the BBC World Service Trust, created the engaging superhero. (Project Axshya is part of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.)

The Bulgam Bhai campaign ran on television and radio in 300 districts of 21 Indian states between February and March, with a potential audience of 234 million people, and was restarted again in July. A nationwide toll-free helpline received more than 1,600 calls during the ad’s first 30 days on the air.

“The campaign was primarily focused on creating awareness about symptoms of TB (i.e. 2 weeks of cough) and the call for action (sputum examination) in the community,” Dr. Chadha said via email. “Preliminary findings suggest that the campaign has been able to achieve the viewership. The response on the advert from the community including physicians has been extremely positive and encouraging.”

India needs more such campaigns, which harness to the public good the infectious humor and imagination of an advertising industry that’s usually devoted to selling products like cars and — much less delightfully — skin-whitening cream.

Bulgam Bhai couldn’t come at a better time.

Even as tuberculosis rates are falling in India and across most of the world, Indian doctors this year announced the first cases of a TB strain that is totally resistant to all antibiotic treatment. Government officials first denied these reports, the Wall Street Journal reported last month, and later – quietly – confirmed them.

“If you don’t blow your own horn, there is no music,” Jimmy Breslin, that great id of New York newspapering, said more than once (and I’ve quoted him more than once). And so: Here’s The Black Nile, profiled in The Egypt Independent. The book, “with its attention to fact and suspension of easy judgment, is the farthest kind of work from #Kony2012,” says James Purtill. And here’s The Black Nile on the summer reading list of India’s Sunday Standard magazine. And, lastly, an unexpected plug from indie publicist LuxLutus. More soon.

Two new pieces at the New York Times/International Herald Tribune: A River Runs Through It weighs the odds of a $40 billion cleanup of the Ganges River. The Gandhian Knot looks at the use and misuse of Gandhi’s name and image — and the takeover of a Gandhian institution by right-wingers.