By Umar Manzoor Shah
DUBAI & SRINAGAR, INDIA, Dec 21 2023 – Durga Das*, a 59-year-old farmer from the Indian state of Maharashtra, committed suicide last year by ingesting a poisonous substance. He was unable to repay the loan he had taken from the bank for the renovation of his single-story house.

This year, his 32-year-old son, Pradeep Das, a father of two children, is equally desperate. The family owns half an acre of cultivated land where they grow cotton. The harvest has been devastated due to intense heat waves, leaving farmers like Dass and his son Pradeep in dire straits. The loan the family had taken is yet to be paid, and the land they had mortgaged in the bank is about to be confiscated. This means no crops, no cultivation, no business, and no food.

“I would have ended my life long ago, but my kids,” sighs Pradeep.

This family is not alone in such a predicament. About 10,000 farmers in India commit suicide every year. This means 27 every day and about one every hour. Suicides in agricultural communities have been a long-standing issue in the country since the 1970s as farmers face an increasing debt crisis.

“Every day, we are inching closer to death. The summers are getting hotter, extremely hot, and there are no rains. We were hoping to repay the bank the entire amount. Our house was in dire need of repair. The monsoon rain penetrated our home and made us all ill—my kids as well as my mother. We decided to repair it and took out a loan against the land we have. But heaven had something else in store for us,” Pradeep told IPS, explaining the recent uncertain weather patterns.

Based on statistical modeling, researchers predict that if there was a 25 percent deficit in rainfall, the number of farmers dying by suicide in a year would increase to 1,188 individuals; 2023 is already confirmed to emerge as the hottest year ever. Several months this year set new temperature records. More than 80 days this year happened to be at least 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times. “Climate change is making agriculture an extremely risky, potentially dangerous, and loss-making endeavor for farmers, and it’s increasing their risk of suicide,” said Ritu Bharadwaj, a principal researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), which conducted the research.

COP 28

From November 29 to December 13 this year, world leaders, climate experts, scientists, and policymakers hailing from 200 countries congregated in Dubai to discuss, debate, and negotiate over the measures needed to be taken to bring down global temperatures and make the earth fit for human habitation.

Despite being the world’s most populous country, India is also anticipated to be the largest contributor to the increased demand for fossil fuels in the next decade. While affluent nations have reduced their emissions by approximately 16 percent since 2007, and China is expected to reach peak emissions before 2030, India’s emissions are poised to surpass those of the European Union. By 2030, India’s emissions are projected to exceed the combined pollution levels of Europe and Japan.

The COP28 climate meeting delivered some important outcomes—a first-time acknowledgment of the need to move away from fossil fuels, a first promise to reduce methane emissions, operationalization and capitalization of the Loss and Damage Fund, and an agreement on a framework for the global adaptation goals.

A lone anti-fossil fuel protestor at COP28. Credit: Umar Manzoor Shah/IPS

However, like all previous COPs, it remained an underachiever, unable to measure up to expectations, particularly in galvanizing more ambitious climate action in the immediate term. The main agenda at COP28 was to carry out a Global Stocktake (GST), a comprehensive assessment of where the world was in its fight against climate change and what more needed to be done to meet the climate objectives.

Meanwhile, millions of farmers like Pradeep in India seem to have no hope of any respite in the times to come. With the recently concluded COP preferring to play a proverbial ostrich in terms of taking a final call on fossil fuel reduction—the prime culprit for the global heat wave—there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel for India’s crisis-torn farming community. This means more heat waves, a surge in temperatures, and the late arrival of monsoons.

“We could plant good seeds, use quality fertilizer, and make the best human efforts for a profitable harvest, but it is weather that always plays a spoilsport. We cannot escape from its wrath. A farmer would toil for the entire year, and just one single heat wave is enough to dash all his hopes. This is it,” Pradeep said.

Will the Loss and Damage Fund help farmers like Pradeep?

The COP28 climate conference in Dubai marked the official launch of a Loss and Damage Fund designed to assist vulnerable countries in dealing with the consequences of climate change. The initial funding for this initiative is approximately USD 475 million, with the UAE committing USD 100 million, the European Union pledging USD 275 million, the US contributing USD 17.5 million, and Japan offering USD 10 million.

The fund itself represents a global financial package aimed at facilitating the rescue and rehabilitation of countries grappling with the cascading impacts of climate change. Specifically, it involves compensation from wealthy nations, responsible for the industrial growth leading to global warming and the climate crisis, to less industrialized nations. These nations, despite having a low carbon footprint, bear the brunt of rising sea levels, floods, severe droughts, intense cyclones, and other climate-related challenges. The evolving climate has profoundly affected lives, livelihoods, biodiversity, cultural traditions, and identities.

Although the Fund was initially introduced during COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, it wasn’t until a few weeks before COP28 that rich and poor nations were able to resolve some of their differences and reach agreements on crucial aspects of it.

Highlighting the limitations of the traditional project cycle, Dr Anand Patwardhan, Professor at the University of Maryland, asserts that it is insufficient for addressing the impacts of loss and damage.  Emphasizing the importance of recognizing that the ongoing discussion primarily focuses on nations, he underscores the critical need for funds to directly benefit individuals who have undergone loss and damage. He stresses the significance of ensuring access to delivery in this context.

Dr Benito Muller, Managing Director, Oxford Climate Policy, says he doesn’t see this as a fund that spends USD 150 billion annually. “It is very difficult to spend this annually.  What this fund should do is not only pilot new funding arrangements but also identify new ways of spending the money, for example, the new insurance schemes.”

Anita Gosh, a New Delhi-based climate activist, says there seem to be no immediate benefits for Indian farmers, even though the Loss and Damage Fund was announced.

“The farmers should be offered comprehensive insurance policies in case of drought-like situations or massive crop damages. The fund should also provide some financial help to the farming communities if they are in distress, like less harvest, marriage ceremonies, or house repairs. The entire idea should be that we must adopt a humane approach towards this community, which is at the receiving end of climate change,” Anita said.

However, she believes the plan for how the fund should be spent is yet to be devised and that she fears it could be shelved for years, as has been the procedure in the past.

“If the past recommendations had been implemented, the situation would have been different today. Now is the time to say enough is enough; we need action on the ground,” Anita told IPS News.

Postscript

During the 14-day period when COP-28 was being held in the opulent Dubai, more than 380 farmers are likely to have killed themselves in India—some for failing to repay the loans, some for failing to pay dowry for their daughter’s marriage, and some for losing hope of giving a good life to their families. But underneath this crisis lurks the prime reason for all these deaths—climate change and the havoc it has been wrecking upon the poor.

Note: The names of the suicide victim and his family have been changed.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);  

By Alice Wolfle and Tanja Sejersen
BANGKOK, Thailand, Dec 21 2023 – Have you ever tried to register a birth, a death or maybe your own marriage? Unfortunately, many of these vital events in Asia and the Pacific remain unregistered often with dire consequences for individuals, families and communities.

Civil registration can be a labyrinth to navigate, comprising of multiple stages with many bureaucratic hurdles. Such complex systems discourage individuals from either commencing or completing the arduous registration process.

But what if the process of registering a birth or death could be made less stressful for a new parent or a grieving relative? As an implementing partner of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative, ESCAP has been working with selected countries in the region to improve their Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) systems using the CRVS Systems Improvement Framework.

This framework provides the tools for a participatory approach to identify bottlenecks and solutions to streamline registration processes. The framework has now been used in Niue, Maldives, Nauru, Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa, and Turkmenistan.

In many cases, people are not aware of the legal timeframes for registering vital events, leading to late registration of births often at school enrolment age, which often means having to pay additional late registration fees or the submission of additional documentation.

People living overseas may be unaware of the need to notify a vital event in their home country or are unable to visit a civil registration office to register the event. Lack of systems for recording overseas vital events in many countries means that events are either not captured, or in some cases may be double counted.

So, why is registering a vital event so complex?

In many countries, notification of a birth or death occurs at a health facility, but an individual must then register the event at a civil registration office. This multi-stage process means several trips to different offices for family members, which can be expensive and time-consuming, especially for those in remote areas.

Additionally, births or deaths occurring outside of health facilities frequently remain unregistered.

Civil registration processes are not only cumbersome for people attempting to register an event, but also for staff engaged in the process. Paper-based registration forms slow down the transfer of information between health facilities and civil registration offices and sometimes staff must (re)enter personal information by hand.

Where digital civil registration systems are used, staff often encounter obstacles in leveraging the potential benefits due to outdated ICT hardware and software, as well as limited internet connectivity. This ‘system’ may be something as simple as a spreadsheet or an MS Access database.

It is hardly surprising that this process is time-consuming for already understaffed facilities, often resulting in long queues at registration offices, not to mention the increased scope for errors or misplaced forms. In many countries, replacing lost forms or changing a mistake is akin to reaching a dead end in the registration labyrinth!

The lack of training and inconsistent forms for coding causes of death in line with the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is also an issue. This means that accurate statistics on causes of death cannot be utilized by government agencies for future planning. Additionally, in many countries, the sharing of data may not be possible among government agencies due to regulations or the absence of integrated digital data systems. This means important data is not utilized to its full potential.

Once the main obstacles for registering a birth or death have been identified, stakeholders are able to develop redesigned civil registration processes. Although CRVS Business Process Improvement aims to encourage longer-term sustainable solutions to strengthen CRVS systems, (e.g., changing legislation, developing digitized platforms, improving interoperability, integrity and efficiency), ‘quick win’ solutions also constitute an important outcome of this work.

These facilitate immediate improvements that require minimal investment (e.g. amending a field on a registration form) to minimize the burden on families and combat the lack of awareness about the importance of registering vital events. ‘Quick win’ solutions may be used as an advocacy tool for increasing future resources for CRVS system improvements.

Examples of longer-term sustainable solutions have included the development of online registration forms, appointment booking systems, SMS mobile messaging communications and development of standard operating procedures for civil registry staff.

The process of implementing a simplified CRVS system is iterative, monitoring progress until complete and timely civil registration is achieved in the Asia and Pacific region as outlined in the Ministerial Declaration to “Get every one in the picture’ in Asia and the Pacific. A smooth experience encourages people to register events, increasing registration completeness alongside accuracy and timeliness of vital statistics, supporting the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development where no one is left behind.

Source: ESCAP

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);  

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Dec 21 2023 – Criminal justice systems in South Asia are failing women, despite stark statistics on the prevalence of violence. WHO estimates translate to one in every two women and girls in the region experiencing violence daily.

Nawmi Naz Chowdhury, a Global Legal Advisor at Equality Now, told a webinar titled ‘Future of Legal Aid in South Asia for Sexual Violence Offenses Against Women and Girls: Lessons from the Past Five Years’ that women and girls experience indifference and neglect at all levels, and there are gaps in legal protections that leave them vulnerable to sexual violence. Where laws do exist, common failures in implementation effectively prevent survivors from accessing justice.

Research by Equality Now, Dignity Alliance International, and partners has revealed that sexual violence laws in South Asian countries are insufficient, inconsistent, and not systematically enforced, leading to extremely low conviction rates for rape.

Long delays in medical examinations, police investigations, prosecutions, and trials are widespread. Survivors often have difficulties filing cases with the police and face community pressure to withdraw criminal complaints and accept informal mediation. Other protection gaps in legal systems include overly burdensome or discriminatory evidence requirements in rape cases and the failure to fully criminalize marital or intimate partner rape.

To bring about change, more needs to be done by governments, and this requires an increase in budgeting and strategizing on a national level, taking lessons derived from best practices in the region and elsewhere.

Training and raising awareness must go hand in hand with giving the police the tools to operate and upgrade their role to better meet society’s needs. This could include being trained in sign language interpretation, using technology to offer services and information, understanding communities and their intersectionality, and including women and girls from various backgrounds and diversities within the police force.

Chowdhury spoke about how women from excluded groups are frequently targeted. “Women and girls from socially excluded communities are often at higher risk of being subjected to sexual violence as compared to other communities due to the use of rape as a weapon of suppression.

“This is accompanied by a general culture of impunity for sexual violence and particular impunity for those from dominant classes, castes, or religions, which often leads to a denial of justice,” she said, with Dalit women and girls and those from indigenous communities encountering even greater obstacles to accessing justice.

Legal weak spots also make young and adolescent girls more vulnerable to sexual violence and, in some circumstances, enable perpetrators of rape to avoid punishment, typically by marrying the victim or obtaining ‘forgiveness’ from the victim, says Choudhury. “Victims of crime have a right to free legal aid, but in countries where these protection gaps exist, access to legal aid for women and girls seeking justice for sexual violence is hindered.”

Choudhury pointed to the high levels of stigma attached to rape in South Asian societies that often lead to the non-reporting or withdrawal of cases or settlements outside the court. Other factors that impede the reporting of sexual violence include fear of repercussions, such as violence, threats to life, or social ostracization.

“How much support are women and girls in South Asia getting?” she asked. “While accessing the criminal justice system, they are met with indifference and neglect at all levels, and this often results in the withdrawal of cases or long delays in adjudication—despite the pervasiveness of sexual violence in the region.”

Governments in the area rarely provide psychosocial care. While India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka have schemes for the payment of compensation to rape survivors, practical barriers often make compensation inaccessible for survivors, Choudhury explained.

Participants in the webinar from various countries in the region offered insights into how access to justice rights functions on a practical level and shared methods by which civil society organizations nudge criminal justice systems to bring about progressive change.

Sushama Gautam, at the Forum for Women, Law, and Development (FWLD) in Nepal, said that legal aid provided by her organization went beyond assisting individuals and included advocacy with key players and institutions like the police and the courts through public interest litigation.

A significant achievement of FWLD was filing public interest litigation in 2001 to get the Supreme Court of Nepal to declare in 2002 that marital sex without the wife’s consent should be considered rape. Nepal’s parliament adopted in 2018 a new criminal code that increased punishment for marital rape but made it a lesser offense than non-marital rape.

Nepal’s constitution guarantees legal aid as a fundamental right, said Gautam, explaining, “The national policy on legal aid and the policy on unified legal aid have also been formulated. These policies promote victim-centered legal aid, and there are digital mechanisms to ensure that legal aid has been established.”

FWLD has an app that provides people with legal information on various violations and helps them contact legal aid providers. The organization also runs a Legal Clinic and Information Center that extends services to survivors of sexual violence, such as legal counseling, and helps take care of their immediate needs.

Manisha Biswas, senior advocacy officer at the Bangladesh Legal Aid Services Trust (BLAST), says that while Bangladesh has made progress in ensuring access to justice for rape victims, estimates show that only one in 90 cases of sexual violence reaches the stage where the victim gets compensation.

Leading the Rape Law Reform Coalition, comprising 17 rights organizations, BLAST was instrumental in getting the Bangladesh Parliament to amend evidence laws to disallow ‘character assassination’ of rape victims by questioning during prosecution.

BLAST offers a range of legal support, including providing information, advice, and free legal representation, underpinned by a network of paralegal workers, many of whom are recruited from different law colleges. Other activities include public interest litigation and advocacy campaigns to increase awareness and understanding of legal rights, remedies, and services.

“BLAST enjoys a good reputation that helps us to act as a guiding force and use our expertise in providing services such as training paralegal volunteers in police and court procedures and in proactively rehabilitating rape victims,” she said.

Biswas reflected that much remains to be done. Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, with more than half of women marrying before reaching the minimum legal marriage age of 18. Bangladeshi laws also permit marital rape.

Overall, says Choudhury, the reality in South Asia is that “the burden of supporting survivors of sexual violence falls on underfunded NGOs, predominantly legal aid organizations that may not have adequate resources.”

This is particularly true for NGOs and CSOs that operate at the grassroots level, which affects access to justice rights for women and girls who have disabilities, indigenous women and girls, and women and girls from minority groups.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);