Last week I visited the indigenous communities in a small village located at foothills of the transitional zone of Similipal bioreserve. I went there to understand how these nondescript communities, who are far away from the so called modern civilisations and urban conglomeration, have restored a natural biodiversity rich forest of almost 555 acres from a state of severe degradation just in a period of 13 years. What their effort has done is also to revive the natural streams that now bring pure water not only to meet their drinking water needs and irrigate their crop fields but also to feed more water to the Budhabalanga river.
As I share this picture of the beautiful and pure stream (one of the four major ones their efforts have revived), free from any pollution, data from the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) warns us how the polluted stretches of India's major rivers increase from 151 in 2009 to 351 in 2018. Most of this pollution comes from the so called educated and modern civilisations in India's cities.
See what the indigenous communities give us and what we turn that into! From pure streams to polluted rivers, the journey is certainly not progress!!
We need to rethink our ways of urbanisation seriously. We need to learn from the indigenous communities.
Ranjan Panda
Convenor, Water Initiatives, Odisha
Convenor, Combat Climate Change Network, India
Tweets @ranjanpanda
7th October, 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment