World Environment Day

There is a day dedicated for every popular cause these days. So there has been a AIDS awareness day , a world friendship day, mothers day. Now the latest buzz is that Arjun Singh is coming with The Reservation day :-)). on this day , you will get to hug and make merry with your reserved mates and more reservations will be dished out...... ok jokes and A.S. bashing apart ( which are synonymous! ) , back to the Environment day. Mostly lip service is what is happening to this cause. On the world stage, the developed and developing countries just point fingers at each others to do more. While the developed countries are obviously doing more, the developing countries feel that taking up these initiatives to save the environment in a big way will put a big dent in their GDPs and fragile economies.

In the developed countries, you can see that some initiatives are working. recyclable products are a reality. Alternative fuel research to power automobiles is gaining momentum. the coming decades should surely see us moving away from Gasoline powered automobiles which will help hugely. The developed world has surely woken up to the reality and some sort of paranoia has already set in due to unexpected climate - Drastic measures are the need of the hour. These drastic measures could soon mean that we have to slowly change the way we live our lives !

Back home in India, things go on as usual. Obviously there are bigger things to deal with and am sure that on a list of 100 most important issues to deal with environmental degradation would not even figure on the list ! The effects of environmental degradation are showing up in no small measure
Tigers are becoming extinct from their erstwhile havens in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. mainly because of poaching and deforestation. Floods are a usual thing come rainy season. while some areas experience severe draught while at other places sever floods wreak havoc causing damage to everything.

It is said that the perennial and holy river Ganga will dry up eventually and cease to be perennial. Considering that the Ganga flows through Uttar pradesh and Bihar, which have been seeing inner turmoil for quite some time and development has been on the back burner. The administration has just ignored the environment completely. Industrial waste and sewage pollutes the rivers here. Encroachments on the river banks pollute the rivers further and obstruct the flow.

Only making the rivers a national property and administering them might save the rivers additionally , nationalising the rivers might also avoid the water-wars that happen frequently between states these days.

The urban supposedly developed areas are no better. Here people like parasites have taken up every inch of land to build houses and apartments. trees are cut down every day. Sewage is freely let out to pollute the water bodies are around. there is hardly any waste management done. nothing else can explain the change in climate in Bangalore which has become much warmer than it was say 10 years ago.

The city of Delhi is a good example of what can be achieved, The buses and autos run on CNG a clean and green low emission alternative to gasoline. The expanding metro train system is giving people an alternative to private transport. Delhi can do these more efficiently as it is a city state. In Other states there is an apathy towards the cities, though the cities generate huge amount of revenues in terms of taxes and other sources. Not much of this money goes into the infrastructure and development , leave alone for saving the environment. The governments are usually busy dishing out subsidies at large and thus emptying the state coffers just so that they can be voted back to power in the next elections.

Housing projects are eating up the landscape around Hyderabad, as the metropolis expands, the biggest causalities are open reserve forests and greenery, which are disappearing really fast. Why cant we expand vertically where possible ? I mean constructing a 60 storey building to house thousands of people in a one acre of land is better than occupying 5 acres of land and build several small building and there by laying a "concrete blanket". in the former case, you can at least leave the 4 acres of greenery alone and let it bloom and server us well in the future.