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(ESPM SP/2010)

TV Will Save the World
By Charles Kenny

‘Forget Twitter and Facebook, Google and the Kindle. Forget the latest sleek iGadget. Television is still the most influential medium around. Indeed, for many of the poorest regions of the world, it remains the next big thing – poised, finally, to attain truly global ubiquity. And that is a good thing, because the TV revolution is changing lives for the better.

Across the developing world, around 45% of households had a TV in 1995; by 2005 the number had climbed above 60%. That’s some way behind the U.S., where there are more TVs than people, but it dwarfs worldwide Internet access. Five million more households in sub-Saharan Africa will get a TV over the next five years. In 2005, after the fall of the Taliban, which had outlawed TV, 1 in 5 Afghans had one. The global total is another 150 million by 2013 – pushing the numbers to well beyond two-thirds of households.

Television’s most transformative impact will be on the lives of women. In India, researchers Robert Jensen and Emily Oster found that when cable TV reached villages, women were more likely to go to the market without their husbands’ permission and less likely to want a boy rather than a girl. They were more likely to make decisions over child health care and less likely to think that men had the right to beat their wives. TV is also a powerful medium for adult education. In the Indian state of Gujarat, Chitrageet is a hugely popular show that plays Bollywood song and dance clips. The routines are subtitled in Gujarati. Within six months, viewers had made a small but significant improvement in their reading skills.

Too much TV has been associated with violence, obesity and social isolation. But TV is having a positive impact on the lives of billions worldwide, and as the spread of mobile TV, video cameras and YouTube democratize both access and content, it will become an even greater force for humbling tyrannical governments and tyrannical husbands alike.

(Wednesday, Mar. 11, 2010 http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1971133_1971110_1971118,00.html)

(UEFS BA/2018)

‘I wish they could be saved’:
The victims of India’s poisonous dust

Silicosis, which kills thousands around the world, is caused by inhaling silica dust found in rock, sand, quartz and many building materials. It can lead to breathing difficulties, regular coughing, chest pains and, sometimes, tuberculosis and other chest infections.
Two years ago, at the age of 17, Urmila Yadav, from the village of Budhpura, located in the north-western state of Rajasthan, became one of the youngest certified cases of silicosis in India. Her case is singular; even in this village where mining and quarry1 work is the only occupation and silicosis is a commonplace disease that strikes almost every family, it is mostly men who are affected.
Rajasthan has been the epicentre of silicosis in India. The number of silicosis certified patients in the state, according to government data, is 8 441 (the figures are available up to April 2017). Actual numbers are likely to be much higher, claim advocacy groups. It is the only state to have a monetary relief mechanism for certified patients, in place since 2013; however, the onus is on workers to get a diagnosis and prove their occupational history, which is challenging in an unregulated industry like mining in India.
For a young teenage girl like Urmila to have silicosis is “quite an unusual case”, says Dr Vinod Jangid, responsible for diagnosing silicosis at the medical college in the district of Kota. There could be more children with silicosis but the government will hesitate to certify young people. “If children are diagnosed with silicosis, it means they are either living close to the mines, or they are working in the mines, both of which are illegal.”
Urmila began to work in the stone quarries next to her village in her childhood. It is common here for men to work in mines and for women and children to supplement the family earnings by carving cobblestones by hand. Most of them work in quarries and head back there after classes. “There are many girls in Budhpura who do this work. Some are 15 or 16 years, and some even younger. I wish they can be saved from this work,” Urmila says.
(Sunaina Kumar. http://www.bbc.com, 09.10.2017. Adaptado.)

1 quarry: an open excavation, usually for obtaining building material.