Activism on the net

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

=========================

Net Activism Without Borders  

by Jaideep V.G., OJR Contributor  


(Online Journalism Review)---Barely three hours after Japan's worst 
nuclear accident, at Tokaimura last September 30, anti-nuclear 
activists from Citizens for Alternatives to Nuclear Energy, a 
Bangalore-based non-governmental organization, downloaded 
technical information on the disaster and possible health effects on 
the local population.  

They relayed these reports to activists in Sirsi, a small town in 
Karnataka, in South India. Sirsi is home to the Kaiga Nuclear Power 
Plant.  

The Sirsi activists in turn, translated the reports into Kannada, the 
local language and circulated these reports to villagers living in the 
immediate vicinity of the Kaiga Nuclear Power Plant, which had its 
reactor core activated last September.  

According to members of India’s Citizens for Alternatives to Nuclear 
Energy (CANE), 17 reports downloaded from the Internet helped put 
safety issues concerning nuclear reactors into perspective.  

Efforts like these, to reach remote areas of the country with 
important information, with little financial resources, were unheard of 
before the Internet changed activism in India.  

The reports also helped people compare the preparedness of 
officials manning the reactor at Tokaimura to their counterparts in 
the Nuclear Power Corporation of India at the Kaiga plant.  

"These reports were sent by Dr. Hoso Kawa, a professor at the 
University of Saga in Japan," said Y.B. Ramakrishna, leader of 
CANE, who was responsible for relaying information to activists in 
Sirsi. "The accident occurred at about 10:30 a.m. local time and 
reports were e-mailed to us by 1 p.m. We had to cull information that 
would be of use to villagers at Kaiga and transmit the information to 
Sirsi. The next day, the local daily, Dheyanishta Patrakarta, 
translated the information and carried it on its front page."

"This went a long way in increasing the awareness of the people 
affected by the Kaiga nuclear plant," he added. "We had to inform 
people living in areas near the Kaiga plant about the safety issues 
involved in Japan and the level of preparedness of the Japanese 
government. It is very important to understand that the government 
here is not equipped to act as swiftly and efficiently in the event of a 
nuclear accident," Ramakrishna said.  

After they were given the information, villagers got together to 
organize a privately funded medical study of all villages within a 10-
kilometer radius of Kaiga. They took water samples from bodies of 
water around the reactor and will compare them with samples 
collected after the reactor begins generating power, Ramakrishna 
said.  

The villagers have also demanded Geiger counters at strategic 
places to identify radiation levels, so they know when radiation 
levels reach dangerous heights.  

Environmentalists say this information is important, as there are no 
concrete evacuation procedures or even a government-backed 
health survey of villagers living in the vicinity of Kaiga. In fact, 
villagers mistook a mock disaster test held a few weeks ago for an 
earthquake response.  

Many groups strongly opposed construction of the Kaiga Nuclear 
Power Plant due to environment and relocation issues. 
Environmentalists argued that the site was in an ecologically fragile 
zone very close to prime fishing grounds in the Arabian Sea.  

Besides, they said, the area was heavily populated, and enforcing a 
1-mile exclusion zone around the plant, as required by Indian 
nuclear safety rules, would be difficult. However, the plant was built 
with delays and went critical in September 1999.  

The reports that were sent to Sirsi also contained information 
collected by a Greenpeace team that conducted experiments at the 
accident site in Japan. The data collected revealed that background 
radiation at the site was between 4,000 and 8,000 times higher than 
normal levels.  

He said the flow of minute-by-minute data was made possible 
because of an “information clearing center” based in Malaysia. “This 
virtual clearing house connects anti-nuclear activists in Asia and is 
a vital information base,” he explained. [Site for clearing house can 
be accessed by e-mail at: nonukesasia at toach.kmis.co.jp]  

"In fact, another group of activists in Gujarat, which publishes a 
magazine called Anumukti [Hindi for liberation from nuclear power], 
also wanted the same information but was unable to access it. They 
put out a general request on the Internet, which we intercepted here 
and promptly mailed them the reports. All this would not have been 
possible without the Net," Ramakrishna said.  

Efforts undertaken by groups like CANE are drastically changing 
perceptions of communication by showing that the Internet can be 
used for more than just e-mail, that activist groups can network, 
collate and disseminate information over the Internet.  

"It is not enough that the Internet is being used merely to gather 
information from various resource bases, we want to use the Net as 
a cheap and efficient means of communication. Most non-
governmental organizations in India have very little money to work 
with and cannot invest in expensive communication equipment, I 
think access to the Net is changing activism in both urban and rural 
India," said Leo Saldanha of the Environment Support Group, a 
group that deals with environmental issues in Coastal Karnataka 
and the Western Ghats, the state’s most biologically diverse region. 
 
Quick to spot the infinite opportunities the Internet has to offer, 
Saldanha and oneworld.net, got together in November to instruct 
NGOs from all over India on the nitty-gritty's of Internet activism.  

The two organizations organized the first workshop for NGOs to help 
build South Asia’s first Internet-based development, environment 
and justice information network.  

"The groups that use the Net for communication or to collect 
information are fragmented. The workshop aims at helping them 
network, build Web sites and source information from scratch," 
Saldanha explains.  

The front-end benefit of the exercise is to form a Web-based 
magazine that is backed by a searchable database of over a million 
documents ranging from the struggle to stop the Narmada Valley 
Project -- a dam that will displace thousands of indigenous people -- 
to the declining population of waterfowl in Southeast Asia.  

"We (activists) in Bangalore have used the Net much more than in 
other parts of the country. And we wanted to let other groups know 
that the Net can be used for more than just dashing off e-mails," 
Saldanha said.  

The program not only received a huge response from various 
activist groups in the country, but also was actively backed by 
Philips Software, which allowed the activists to use its Research 
and Development facilities.  

While a large corporation like Philips is backing efforts such as the 
one undertaken by Saldanha, smaller, more region-specific 
organizations like Mahiti are helping groups to achieve Web-
presence, to raise funds online and get minority groups like gays 
and lesbians together.  

"We have worked on at least 30 online projects for organizations 
ranging from the Karnataka AIDS forum to sustainable and 
meaningful eco-tourism alternatives for groups like Equations, an 
NGO that successfully fought hotel-giant Taj against setting up shop 
in the sensitive forests of Nagarhole in Karnataka," says Sunil 
Abraham of Mahiti.  

Equations uses the Internet to contact eco-tourism activists in Africa, 
New Zealand and Madagascar, where eco-tourism is better defined 
and has ground rules on how not to disturb eco-systems while 
setting up tourist destinations, he added.  

"I have found that more and more groups want to get on the Net, not 
only because of cost options, but because they instantly have a 
plethora of related sites and experiences to delve into and 
incorporate in their own work ethic," said Abraham.  

He feels that organizations like Mahiti, which have begun operations 
exclusively to look at options for NGOs and activists on the Internet, 
represent a telling trend.  

When oneworld came to India, the traffic for NGO sites increased by 
4 million hits a week, Saldanha says.  

Ramachandra says the future will see networks expanding to village 
headquarters. He predicts rural computing will make progress with 
the Department of Telecommunications' assurance that all 
exchanges in the state will be digital by 2001, and chief minister 
S.M. Krishna's announcement that all district commissioners will 
soon be networked by computers and video conferencing.  

Non-Governmental Organisations in nerve centers like Bangalore 
will then be able to access and even collect field data simply by 
networking with their field agents in any remote part of the state, he 
said.  

This essentially means that an alternate rural network will be in 
place, complete with decision-making centres, data collection 
agencies and even agents to make immediate decisions.  


Jaideep V.G. is a senior correspondent for The Asian Age, a daily 
newspaper in India. He works in Bangalore and reports on defense 
and environment issues.  

Copyright 2000 Online Journalism Review  





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