Boycott lunch and dinner

Now, it8217;s been some time since our MPs substituted boycotts and walkouts for lawmaking, debate, discussion and other such classical, but tedious, parliamentary work. God knows, George Fernandes may or may not have made hundreds of crores in defence deals. But the MPs, with all their committees and experience, cannot find a shred of evidence on their own, so they boycott him forever. It8217;s too much work to research the Best Bakery case so you can still hold the House to ransom over Ayodhya. This particular case, however, was even more fitting for another boycott because these were, after all, products sold by these wretched multinationals, distrust for which cuts across party lines. This is irrespective of the fact that the leaders of each party, when in power at the Centre or in the states, justify endless global junkets to solicit investments from the same multinationals.

But now if somebody has found poisons in your drinks, and the drinks are manufactured by these MNCs, then it must be a deliberate criminal act, a multinational conspiracy to poison one-sixth of mankind and, to make the irony doubly cruel, charge money for it as well. It all sounded so logical as well: Not long ago the same CSE had found bottled water marketed by the same companies also to contain too much pesticide residue. It had to be some kind of an MNC conspiracy so, not to lose any time, Nitish Kumar8217;s railways, which are not so hot at running their own trains safely or on time, also joined the melee with advertisements flaunting lab-test reports to say how mineral water manufactured by it Railneer is the cleanest of all.

The political class thinks it has fulfilled its responsibility. Sundry other NGOs and school principals have also jumped on the same MNC-bashing bandwagon to announce a boycott of the same poisonous drinks in school canteens and elsewhere. One television channel had a whole gaggle of balle-balle type boys in some Punjab city holding forth on the relative merits of saadi apni lassi. Then Reuters released the picture of an Amritsar juice-seller displaying newspaper clippings on pesticides in your colas on his cart. I think we are getting carried away a bit. I think also we are missing the point. While, as supposedly world-class companies, Coke and Pepsi should be more conscientious than to serve us products with these levels of contamination, the real issue is not the perfidy of the MNCs. It is, instead, the free-flowing pesticides in our neighbourhood.

The CSE has now finished with mineral water and branded soft drinks. What, for example, would our response be if they next pick up lassi samples from your neighbourhood halwai? Fruit juice from a stall at random bus stands, even nariyal pani straight out of the shell? How will you respond if they find similar levels of pesticide residues all over them as well? Will you then boycott all of these? And switch to what? Gangajal? Even a high school laboratory would show a glass of that holy water picked almost anywhere from the river would contain not only more bugs but even more pesticides than any bottle of cola.

What else will you boycott? Vegetables and fruits which, as so many studies have shown, routinely contain several times more pesticide residue than permissible? Or milk? Most of our farm and dairy produce is laden with enormous amounts of pesticide residues. Our poultry farms routinely use more antibiotics and hormones than would be permitted in any civilised society. Wait till CSE gives you a test report on your eggs now, and masala omelette would acquire a completely different meaning. In fact one of the biggest threats to our agricultural exports is the increasing worldwide consciousness of pesticide residues. It was not long ago that one of our wine shipments came back from Europe. A senior officer in the Union agriculture ministry told me, only half in jest, 8220;They told us, we had asked you to send wine, not Flit or Baygon.8221; Only last week the Germans sent back a consignment of Indian chillies for the same reason.

To respond to CSE8217;s revelations by boycotting bottled water or the colas is as lazy as asking for the head of Bill Gates or Carly Fiorina if your computer got burnt out because of voltage fluctuations so common with the quality of power we are supplied. Additionally, you also risk missing the big point, that we, all of India actually, are today floating in a sea of uncontrolled, unmonitored and unseen pesticides. Almost every element in our food chain is more poison than in most other civilised countries. What is worse, we do not even have the most elementary mechanism, or regulation, in place to monitor and check that.

If you don8217;t believe that, come for a drive with me to any farm on the outskirts of Delhi, or do it around your own city. Ask a farmer how much pesticide he uses and for what. Ask him who tell him what to use, how much and what precautions to take. Then go, quietly, to the shop selling agricultural inputs 8212; fertilisers, seeds and pesticides 8212; in the village and watch your pristine farmer, the very anti-thesis of the MNC, pick up those cans and boxes of poison and drown his crops in the poisons. There is no education, no awareness, extension workers do not reach the farmer, the shopkeeper is happy to sell as much as he can and the simple 8212; but ignorant 8212; farmer is never satisfied using the minuscule quantities prescribed. He hates those dreadful bugs, and is not satisfied until he sees them dying in front of his eyes. If you have any doubts, please pick some tomatoes, brinjals or even a lowly kaddu gourd from this morning8217;s vegetable shopping and take it to a laboratory.

A little bit of amateur farming has taught me and my family a great deal but the most useful insight is this 8212; the extent of pesticide abuse in our farming. Check out the crimps distributed at seed shops. The first prescribed step in preparing the beds for planting is to sprinkle it liberally with something called Phorate granules. It is a systemic pesticide 8212; which means it is absorbed by the plant and retained for a long time so the pests that attack it die. Mercifully, it has a reasonable half-life of thirty days or so. But to increase the yield and fruit size our farmers use repeat doses even as the produce is ripening for harvest. So the next time you have a sudden attack of food poisoning after a meal of well-washed greens you know what is to blame. Visit a farm in the tomato or brinjal harvest season and see your very own desi farmer give his produce the 8220;holy dip8221;. All produce is soaked and washed in water mixed with mustard oil, a fungicide usually Bavistin and a pesticide usually Sevin, remember that one? The Union Carbide plant in Bhopal manufactured that. The idea is neat: The mustard oil helps these poisons stick to the tomatoes and the brinjals so they do not rot or lose firmness of complexion on their way to your kitchen. These are genuine user statements. Check these out.

Because there is no checking on any farm produce in India for these residues, our farmers are encouraged by pesticide manufacturers most of them Indian and only some MNCs to use these poisons way in excess of internationally accepted norms. It is horrible enough, for example, to find internationally-banned DDT, Lindane and Chlorpyriphos in your colas. But did you pause to ask someone how these got into your aquifers anyway? And how come these continue to sell so freely? What are your regulators, the ministries of health, agriculture and food processing, doing? How come, when we live so dangerously in so poisonous an environment we have to wait for a mere NGO to wake us up. And then we think we can get away with merely avoiding the colas.

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