A month ago, I had written how Indianenvironment ministers spend little timeon the larger questions of natural resourcemanagement - issues dealing with the maintenance and enhancement of the health of ourlands, water resources, forests, air and wildlife,and the disposal of our wastes. These issuesseem so large and complex and require suchmajor policy interventions that most ministersand bureaucrats find it, comfortable to devotemore time to politically profitable, media-avoured and immediate issues of projectclearance. Unrelenting pressures from international conferences and treaty obligations forcethem to use up a more-than-required share oftheir time tackling global issues.
But questions of natural resource management are equally pertinent. They graduallymagnify and acquire critical dimensions, even-ually sapping the health of both the people andthe economy. Sometimes, whole civilisationsfade away; history is replete with such examples.
I raise this issue once again before our readers because a few weeks ago, I saw the dramaticresults of such neglect in Uzbekistan: the AralSea catastrophe, which the UN EnvironmentProgramme says is the world's second largestenvironmental disaster after Chernobyl. I hawtried to present the details of that horrific catastrophe in this edition, along with an interviewwith a courageous scientist, Oral Ataniyazovawho is battling the post-disaster health hazards.
I felt that the most apt delineation of thedisaster - philosophically speaking - camefrom Michael Glantz, a political scientist fromthe us. He placed it in the category of "creepingenvironmental problems" - problems whichdon't hit you suddenly, like an earthquake, aflood, a Chernobyl or a Bhopal. They are thecumulative results of small changes that havebeen allowed to take place because of the lack ofpolitical will to see how the ground is steadilyslipping from under your feet, until you findyourself facing a precipice. By then, your ownmomentum forces you down the precipice; youhave theoption to begin thelongjourneyup onlyif you still survive after billing rock-bottom.
I hope the Aral Sea case will be readcarefully by our readers, especially in India.This is because the same degeneration is takingplace everywhere. As such, there is nothing newabout the steps that led to the Aral Sea crisis,but what is amazing is the ability of a societyand a government to disregard it for so long.
The Aral Sea calamity has arrested theworld's attention only because of the region'sunique ecology. It was a large and beautiful sea,with a closed basin. Thus, the sea became thevictim of every disastrous activity, particularlythe withdrawal of water and the use of toxinsfor cotton cultivation. The dramatic result is afast disappearing and highly toxic sea - engen-ering an extraordinary range of diseases,including a variety of cancers - besides animpoverished population.
India is also using massive quantities of poisonous chemicals in certain agricultural pockets and diverting a lot of river water. The resultshave been less drastic, because our rivers drainout into an open ocean system. But there areinnumerable "creeping environmental problems". Consider Delhi, for instance. Its air wasmuch cleaner just 10 years ago, but now it is atoxic hell. With all the new cars coming into thecity, just wait for what it will be like in preciselyfive years. A crisis is approaching, but are wedoing anything about it?
The decline of our forests has been slow butsteady. An attempt had been made to arrest thisdecline in the '80s. But as T N Seshan, formerenvironment secretary and the present ChiefElection Commissioner, queried at a recentmeeting of NGos, what about the pledge wemade soon after independence, to raise ourgreen cover to 33 per cent of the country's landarea? Since then, we've lost much of our forests.If, however, we had achieved our aim, so manydegraded farmlands would have been undertrees that our paper industry would have facedno dearth of raw material.
Take yet another case: the waste disposalfrom our cities. Again, the creeping problemshave reached such a magnitude that the waste isall around us... our rivers (like the Yamuna) godead wherever they meet a city and every sip ofwater is a toxic brew.
The solution lies in either our ministersfinding the time to tackle these problems asunrelentingly as they creep in upon us, or analternative governance system, or the civilsociety must take the lead in a big way.Otherwise, as somebody put it, in the longterm, we are all dead. This may happen to usnot just individually but collectively as wen. Letthere be no mistake, because we are already living with several stark examples of such creepingenvironmental problems - Kalahandi andPalamau, for instance.