Are you
comfortable with the heat? If not, wake up; set the agenda for your future…
Ranjan K
Panda[1]
Heat is peaking up in our state yet again. And this time, it coincides with the election
heat. Election, as I say, is a new
season altogether and a flooding time for false promises. The leaders, most of whom reside in their
comfort zones of air conditioning homes and cars, will now encounter the real
heat the common people of the state are forced to live with; mostly because of
a visionless leadership which does not recognize that its wrong development
plans are driving Odisha fast into a heat chamber and desertification.
Memories of the leaders and planners are the shortest and
they forget the heat as soon as they go back to their comfort chambers. However, we citizens have a responsibility to
remind them the reality. We have to keep
reminding them that crossing 40 degree C in March itself is now an established
weather condition for the state and that last year only we had to lose many
people to sun stroke. Odisha is a now a
globally known as a climate change hot spot.
Temperature hovers above 45 degree C for most of summer and we also have
the record of crossing 50 degree C several times in recent past. Our leaders, who beg votes each five years,
need to recognize this as a real issue and not engage in lip service
activities.
They also need to understand that we have invited this
disaster by our deeds. While we cut down
our trees, we cement up our roads and concretize our cities, we forget that we are
at a defining moment in world’s history of existence when we need to respect
the Mother Earth the most. But we do the
opposite. We have to stay in all
possible comfort that we can buy and that are necessarily anti-nature. We are the modern society. We don’t need trees but air conditioners. And while we fight for our right to drinking
water, we don’t bother to see where from the water comes to those taps. What we should be concerned most is that an
increased condition of heat, the most impacted would be our water
resources.
In a recent warning five hundred scientists have said that
the majority of the world’s population are going to face irreversible water
crisis just within a space of two generations.
This is due to climate change, pollution and over-use of freshwater
resources, and is going to be catastrophic.
According to these scientists, more than half of the world’s nine
billion people already live within fifty kilometres of an “impaired” water
resource. Impaired as they warn are
sources that are running dry and are polluted.
And about a billion are using the non-renewable ground water
resources. We are running out of water
or towards filthy water that cannot support life. Odisha, as we have been warning repeatedly
for more than one and half decades now, is a hot bed of climate change. Its unique placement at head of the Bay of
Bengal makes it more vulnerable to climate’s vagaries.
Globally, as well as in Odisha, the way we are urbanizing
has a major contribution in the catastrophe that stares at our face. Cities are growing awfully fast and vast, and
that too at the cost of our villages and natural resources. Gross Domestic Product driven economic growth
has outsmarted the natural resourced based sustainable economies of this country. Farm lands shrink, farmers die or move to
cities in search of survival. Neither
they get a good life nor their knowledge of sustainable management of natural
resources are integrated in city planning where concrete becomes the
mantra. So, in nutshell, we impoverish
them yet lose the opportunity to learn from them. We are a gross failure in planning our
cities. We have covered up all the
natural spaces with concrete structures.
We find water bodies as real estate opportunities. We make rivers our dumping grounds. And we don’t even spare our flood
plains. Construct, construct and
construct wherever there is an inch of space available. And city life is a major culprit in causing
climate change both directly and indirectly.
After abusing all surface water sources, we are now
exhausting our ground water resources.
As a result, cities are becoming water insecure and are increasingly
dependent on the villages – both nearby and far off – for their water requirements. And this means more conflict between the
urban and rural areas. Irrigation would
further shrink and cities would receive more influx of villagers. We have to relook development of landscapes
in a complete new perspective. Without
promoting centralized ecologically destructive and water insensitive and
insecure cities, we should promote cities based on principles of sustainable
management of water and ecological management.
We still have to learn from the villagers such principles. Cities should secure their own water
resources by properly planning city as ecological landscapes rather than
cementscapes. The farmers and forest
dwellers in villages should get rewarded for their traditional knowledge and
wisdom of conservation and ecological restoration. Dignifiedly remunerative price for agro and
forestry products; and providing all basic amenities including education,
health care, drinking water and sanitation in villages could help build the
cities healthy and happy.
A citizen driven initiative has already begun to build a
healthy relationship between city dwellers and Rivers. We are calling it “Healthy Rivers, Happy
Cities”. We are asking questions to the
political leaders about their agenda on these issues. Are you asking?
[1] Convenor of Water Initiatives
Odisha, he is a leading water expert of the nation and a senior freelance
journalist. Phone: 9437050103, Email: ranjanpanda@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment