Missing the forest for the .....

Question: would you agree to having a fine tooth removed and replaced by an implant because it helped GDP?
No?  Well, you are holding back India’s growth story.
Read on…
 
I am going through an old issue – December 2000 - of Sanctuary mag and there is a feeling of depressing familiarity. It quotes the then Director of Project Tiger as stating (at the Millennium Tiger Conference in 1999) that, in about 25 years since the launch of Project Tiger in 1973, India had lost half of its standing tiger forests – 150,000 square kilometres of forest land that would never again see another tiger pugmark.
Let’s put that in perspective:
That is 15 million hectares. 37 million acres
About 70 times the combined size of Bandipur + Nagarhole + Wayanad.
…and we now know that in 2000 the destruction had only begun.
 

A ghastly haircut this. Meghalaya 2022

In 2020-21 – just one year, mind you – we are told that about 31 lakh trees (largely in forests) were cut for public infrastructure projects: largely roads, which are now a national obsession. We are told that you need to break an egg to make an omelette, so this is inevitable. An equal number were planted somewhere, we are told, so there’s no problem. And then, voila! We are told that India’s forest cover has increased. 

Fiction flows.
 

Fact: few planted trees survive.  

Even if they did, a forest is not a collection of trees, it is a living, dynamic, complex, interactive ecosystem about which we know, well, nothing really.  

We do not know what we do not know.

 
Yesterday was World Water Day and you must have read the odd trite tweet as a tribute, perhaps a eulogy.  The day earlier was International Day for Forests and we must wonder if these are different.
Forest = water.
 
Stand up for our forests. 
They need you.
You need them.
 

Growing Nuts is a Vicious Cycle

On July 12th, The Hindu documented the death of Renuka Aradhya, a 35 year old farmer, who committed suicide at Kaarekurchi in Gubbi taluk of Tumakuru district.

If you missed reading about his demise, you can hardly be blamed. The story is a familiar, predictable one - depressingly familiar and infuriatingly predictable - to anyone who has an ear for news that concerns the lives of 263 million farmers (the number, as per the 2011 census, that includes both cultivators and agricultural labour).

Two hundred and sixty three million human beings and their children, whose futures have been missed between two economic stools in the last twenty four years of liberalisation, who have been designated ‘laggards’ in the growth process of an emerging economy, who live outside India’s urban agglomerations and suffer the real pain of being exposed to the real costs of ‘development’.

Aradhya had four acres of land on which there were coconut and arecanut trees; apparently, he had taken a gold loan of Rs.90,000 from State Bank of Mysore, Rs.70,000 from the Primary Land Development Bank and Rs.3 lakh from private money lenders.
 He killed himself because his borewell failed.
 …..which meant drilling another borewell. In Tumakuru district, among India’s most water stressed districts, this is a minor form of fracking, no less; it means reaching into the depths of the Earth, over a thousand feet below the ground. The cost? At least a couple of lakhs, which he could not raise in loans.
 ……as a result, his coconut and arecanut farm dried up.
…..which meant he would not be able to pay the annual interest on loans of Rs. 1.30 lakhs (@ 15% on loans taken from banks, @ 36% on ‘private’ loans). The question of principal repayment must not have crossed his mind.

The only reason I remembered to cut this little news item out was that I had spent a couple of days near Tumakuru in a training campsite, a day before Aradhya killed himself.

This is original hard rock country, the outstanding beauty of the scrub and the weathered adaptation of the human and cattle contributing to an ineffable beauty at sunrise and sunset. While arecanut is a traditional crop in the area, the last two three decades have seen three changes in the economics of arecanut, each debilitating in its impact on the farmer, all taken together a recipe for a crisis
1. The first change is the intensity of arecanut plantation, driven by the rapid growth of the pan masala and the gutka industry. Walking around the area, I saw arecanut everywhere, intensely planted and profusely watered from the bowels of the Earth. Water, from underground aquifers that have been charged for decades, now being consumed with imprudence born out of ignorance, short-term economics and peer behaviour. Yet, for every two farms that exhibited the verdancy of assured, timely irrigation by borewell water, there was one that had been abandoned, the plantation standing forlorn in a caked, brown field, cast to the dry winds, just as its owner had been cast to an uncertain fate.
2. The second change is in the rainfall or, more accurately, its absence. Tumkaru has shrivelled into a dehydrated zone, its lakes long gone, the underground aquifers rapidly receding as farmers pump even more water out in a viciously spiralling downward cycle of recession.
3. Yet, this is not all. Arecanut, with its volatile economics has, over the years, become the femme fatale of the farmer. An example: the price of arecanut rose rapidly in 2014 to Rs. 900 a kilogram in August 2014; more areas were planted up, more borewells dug in a mindless frenzy, many farmers seeking a way out of earlier distress, other simply avaricious . Today the price is about Rs. 280, a drop of seventy percent in one year.

Most of us who live in cities do not really appreciate the import of such a drop. To put this in perspective and use an example, imagine you had all your income coming from an index fund on the stock market that you hoped would appreciate above the rate of inflation. Imagine now that, instead of crashing, as it did, by about 4% on Black Monday in August, it crashed 70% to about 7000 points – the number it was at about ten years ago. Considering the inflation in the last decade, you would be at least twice, possibly three times, poorer than you were then.

India’s cash crop farmers – growing cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, arecanut, ginger – have recessed into a state of permanent poverty because their Sensitive Index has crashed. It is a crash that has driven millions in the last few years to poverty from a level that might have been modest, yet above subsistence .

So, why did the price of arecanut drop precipitously?
In 2013, the arecanut crop in the Malnad and coastal Karnataka region declined by fifty percent due to heavy rain that caused a fungal infection in the plant. As the price of arecanut shot up as a result; many farmers made the switch from food crops to arecanut in a classic, much repeated, example of a failure of systems thinking – doing something without knowing that all others in the boat are doing pretty much the same thing.

The firms engaging in processing arecanut then decided to import it , triggering a slump in prices: in 2013-14, about 18,000 quintals were imported, in 2014-15, over five times this quantity came in.

.. …and why can’t the Government impose import duties on arecanut?
The answer lies in bilateral trade agreements – SAFTA and SAARC - where the member countries enjoy total exemption from import duties.

As you read this, is there the ol’ vicious cycle feeling, a sense of helplessness, a feeling of inevitability, of ineluctable decline in Agriculture’s condition?
There is, equally, the larger question to be asked amidst this tragedy: all this for what purpose?

The accelerated desertification of an entire district, the crippling of its farming community, the felling of natural vegetation and the increased wildlife conflict, all to produce a crop that is the crucial input for a final product known to be addictive and carcinogenic, the single largest cause of oral cancer in India today.

My belief - and you are welcome to agree or disagree - is that the starting point is a ban on pan masala and gutka. If you do agree, please write in to the Health and Agriculture Ministers, asking them to do what is right and, yet, provide the agrarian sector the expertise and support needed to move away from arecanut to more sustainable crops that are benign, useful and remunerative.
It's the least we can do for our planet.

Will Softbank save the otter...and a lot of other wildlife?

Softbank, that somewhat eccentric internet company in Japan run by an equally maverick Masayoshi Son, has just announced that it will lead a JV with Bharti in solar energy, investing $ 10 billion – that is about 63,500 crores – over the next ten years to generate, hold your breath, 20,000 megawatts of power. 

These numbers, by any standard of energy generation - conventional or otherwise, are awe-inspiring, and, hopefully, not just for the media to digest, but real. Pricewater Coopers says that, if implemented today, it would be the size of the entire power generation capacity of Greece or the Philippines. More importantly, this number is 50 per cent of India's current installed hydropower generation capacity. And that is the reason I am attempting to look for unintended consequences of such immense investment. 

But first, about hydropower. Which means, dams. A day after Softbank’s announcement, the Business Standard carried the following write-up: 

 India's largest hydroelectric project has been given all the requisite clearances by the environment ministry in spite of repeated rejections by its own experts. The 3,000-Mw Dibang river valley mega dam in Arunachal Pradesh, once fully built, will wipe clean 4,577 hectares of forest that is also the homeland of a small community of 12,000, the Idu Mishmi. 

The project worth Rs 25,000 crore was approved on September 22 last year without a study to understand the downstream impact. Instead, the ministry has asked that a study be carried out five years after the dam is commissioned. Likely to be completed in nine years, the study will be done, therefore, 14 years later. According to norms, such studies are to be carried out cumulatively for all hydroelectric projects on the river concerned before clearance is given. 

The dam is only one of 17 planned on the river that flows through the Dibru Saikhowa National Park. It was originally rejected by the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) in July 2013, the apex body advising the ministry on granting of forest clearances. Ultimately, talks between the environment and power ministries pushed the project by overruling earlier rejections. Repeated meetings and letters over the next one-and-a-half years between the two ministries finally succeeded in clinching the forest clearance, government records show. FAC, in spite of comprising some of the most senior forest officials in the ministry, cannot give non-binding recommendations. 

Serious discrepancies in releasing accurate data were repeatedly seen on the part of the state government and project developer, National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), during the clearance process. This included failing to mention that chopping down 325,000 trees would critically endanger the refuge for animals such as elephants, tigers, fishing cats and snow leopards. Unquote 

India's search for power is the single biggest threat to our forests and wildlife and hydropower is a reason – a big reason – why fish are disappearing from our rivers. Many species of fish swim up the river to spawn and lay eggs in sand. Dams stop them from doing so and disrupt their breeding resulting in precipitous decline in native fish after their habitat is modified by dam construction. 

Fish, of course, are also hit by pollution of the rivers, sand mining and unsustainable forms of fishing including the use of dynamite, yet dams probably head the ‘villians’ list. In the last twenty years, India’s race for power has been energised by coal and hydro, at a scale that is mind-numbing.  And, as the fish have disappeared, the otters have too. 

Softbank is certainly not the first company to set up a solar park in India, but in sheer scale and ambition it has the potential to be a game changer. Hopefully - cross my fingers and twist my toes, roll my eyes and rub my nose - hopefully, we are reaching a point where the need for new dams, will be questioned by the decision makers, because a credible, workable alternative – solar energy – now exists, the costs of which have dropped 25% in the last three years, and are dropping every year as new ingenious ways of harnessing the sun’s energy are commercialised. Hence the optimism. And a hope that Softbank will help the otter - and all other forms of wildlife, aquatic and terrestrial - survive.

Curtains at the Play

Sometime in 2011

It has been a long day – an early flight, followed by intense work – and I make it to the performing arts theatre just in time. I flop into a seat by the side door just as the lights dim. This is a weekday, the three short plays are in Hindi, have not been written by anyone famous and have no theatre stars or fetching reviews online, so, from the silhouettes of heads in front, the audience seems thin.

A couple of the usual announcements follow (‘No breaks. Each play of the duration of half-an-hour. Use your mobile phone and you will be hung upside down above a lion’s cage’…that sort of thing). I am hardly listening though, sending messages to friends I’d be meeting later that evening for dinner. The side-door to my immediate left opens and, in the darkness, I faintly notice a man being wheeled in by his assistant. The wheelchair is placed next to me and from the corner of my eye, I see the slumped silhouette of a senior citizen in a kurta-pyjama, his head half forward and cocked to one side, his mouth partly open.

The performance has just begun.

The stories are charming, commonplace and real, the language colloquial and the humour ready and simple, all of which make them happily engaging. Somewhere in the middle though, I hear a gentle snore from my left, not loud enough to annoy, yet hardly soft enough to ignore. This chap clearly did not pay the three hundred bucks I did! Even when he does not snore, he hardly seems to pay attention, for there is no movement of any sort. Not wanting to stare at his face to see if the eyes are open, I curb the urge and stay focused on the play.

When the final play ends, the audience stands up to applaud and the lights on stage come on. We cheer as the actors and the accomplished lady director take their bows and acknowledge gratitude to Prithvi Theatre for hosting the play. The lights brighten and, glancing to my left, I realise – after some initial difficulty – that, for the last couple of hours I have been sitting next to Shashi Kapoor.

The mind protests at once in confusion; it refuses to accept this image, choosing instead to rely on a cache of sepia-tinted, yet bright memories, of my favourite actor and the heart-throb of a million adolescents. Is this him? In that moment, I see the intensity of his performance in Kalyug – the words soft, the eyes expressive, the silence dignified – the starkness of Junoon, and of that one minute, just that minute, in Ijaazat that made all the difference. Of his skill at the masala stuff, led by Deewar, where he was always cut from a different cloth, a shade above, a class, shall we say, apart. Of a guy who always looked like a million bucks (give or take a couple of million). Of a guy with no attitude and an easy, fetching smile and charm. That was my Shashi Kapoor, wasn’t it?

I reluctantly walk slowly away, watching this figure from the corner of my eyes: an old man in the wheelchair, the visage – half-lidded eyes, drooping chin, unseeing eyes marked with disinterest, head unsteady and the slumping posture – only as unreal as a sepia-tinted figure of smoke in the mist.

That evening, though, at dinner, there is a warm feeling to know that I sat beside Shashi Kapoor for a couple of hours one memorable evening.

Shashi Kapoor

( March 18th1938 - December 4th 2017)

Reflecting on a recent Delhi trip and the need to be assertive....

‘Six kgs excess,’ said the lady at the check-in

With a charming, engaging smile

‘Would you please pay by cash, rupees

As the card will take quite awhile?’

I put on my favourite hunted look

As the mouse would before (what else?) a cat

‘Could you please waive this once away

And have a delighted customer after that?’

She shook her head as she wrote the receipt

(The smile was still in its intended place)

I paid up a ransom that emptied my wallet

(And the blood off my cherubic face).

As I walked ashen, the next man checked in

His bag was light; no excess to declare

Built like a hulk, all beef, beer and bulk

HE was excess baggage; it just wasn’t fair!

I thought for a moment of raising the point

That a chap and his bag be together weighed

A limit be placed that charges his flab

And rewards a guy who slim has stayed……(that’s me!)

But I walked on, poorer, a rebel with a cause

Cursing myself as a weakling dimwit.

When I reflect on what held me back

I guess it was the smile that did it.

Avoiding a Dangerous Elephant in the Tall Grass of the Nameri Jungle

We held our breath as the elephant moved
Shaking her head from side to side,
We ducked, hid and prayed in strength
That the wind would not betray our hide.

"Come," urged the leader, in a hoarse whisper,
"We must move behind her ample back,
No noise, no voice, NO camera click,
All which trigger her frontal attack."

We silently formed the line and crept
I bravely brought up the dangerous rear
The eyes that met my gaze were steely
My blood just froze with a nameless fear.

We moved carefully on the path ahead
As the elephant lifted her trunk a-height
She sniffed the air and took a step
Sending us scurrying in frenzied fright.

After awhile, we had crossed danger zone!
And stopped to catch our breath at last
Watching the great head from distance afar
Living the moments just gone past.

A man came up from the opposite way
And looked at us with a puzzled eye
We gave him the gist; he listened and said
"It's my elephant! Doesn't hurt a fly."

The Itinerant

One afternoon, when I was about eight or nine years old, I came home from school to find a tall, thin young foreigner chatting with my dad.  ‘Chatting’ is possibly the wrong word, for he was listening in a polite, typically European way with a broad smile on his face.

Dad looked at me, “Do you remember reading the letter from Robert Smeets?”

I certainly did.  The episode had begun with Saro Aunty – my favourite, lovable Aunt and a gregarious, sociable lady if there ever was one – meeting Robert at some event or the other. He was a young Dutchman, who had worked for a bit, saved a modest sum of money and was now travelling around the World.  His stories apparently were fascinating (she remembers some of them even today, I would imagine).  My Uncle and Aunt lived in Sri Lanka at the time and, if I recall, Robert spent a few days with them.  Coming to know of Robert’s plan to visit India from there, my intrepid Aunt suggested that he come over to Digboi and visit and stay with us.  Most people will politely thank the other person for this invitation, promise to do so and then fade away.  But Robert was decidedly not like most people.  Shortly thereafter, my parents received a letter from him, written in a handwriting that can only be described as a combination of art and geometry – full of angles and stylish twists – that is characteristic of a European coming to terms with English.  With a few carefully spelt words, he invited himself over and, when the good Aunt followed up with a letter introducing him, it was an offer Dad and Mum just could not refuse.

So here he was, on a fine day in the mid 1970s.

He had arrived by train, which caused no small consternation as no one in our family, in our friends circle, or their friends circle had ever travelled by train east of Calcutta, except in a dire emergency such as the 1962 war with China.  But, remember, Robert Smeets was different. He could survive just about anywhere though he didn’t quite look it: a tall, gangly sort of fellow, with a blond mop of hair on his head, a slightly loony smile that was perpetually in ‘On’ mode and a soft, genteel voice that was barely above a whisper.

Yes, Robert Smeets, I will say again, was not like most people we knew. 

For starters, he had hardly any luggage, which was a matter of endless conversation for a family that accumulated trunks, hold-alls, suitcases, briefcases, carry bags and picnic baskets.  He then did not seem to see the need to ever wash clothes and the room he lived in had a most peculiar smell that got me fascinated and intrigued all at once, and my poor mother driven to some despair, as the ‘jamadar’, as our sweeper was called, had let it be known that cleaning this room was way below his dignity of labour.  But all was forgiven when, at meal times, Robert would eat most joyfully, chewing every morsel and enquiring about the details of the recipe from my mom, prefacing every sentence with a softly spoken, “Mrs. Vasudevan, could you please….”; indeed, his formality and insistence on manners was admirable as was his frequent notings in a little diary that he carried around, reminiscent today of a long-forgotten era.

In those days, Dad had a monthly free quota of petrol, since he worked in a company that produced petroleum, and he placed the car at Robert’s command.  But Robert was not interested in the least in using it, choosing to walk everywhere and chatting with children and adults alike.  His handicap of not knowing Hindi did not seem to deter his communication ability,  which was anchored always by a trademark smile that got most people on his side; undeniably, the fact that he was white helped too, as Digboi had until the mid 1960s a number of British managers. He caused quite a stir wherever he went, photographing the vendors around him with his little black-and-white film camera, or near Charali, the main bazaar where he insisted on speaking with (and photographing) the beggars in a tone of respect that they must have found most suspicious.

One can only imagine, forty years later, the sort of questions he must have faced a thousand times in the sub-continent.  “Why are you travelling around the World?”, “What do you do in The Netherlands?”, “Are you married?” (this last question, no doubt, from a suspicious fellow travelling in the same coupe as Robert, his family in tow), “Why are you not married?”, “Do you have a girlfriend?”, “Why are you not studying?” and about a hundred others that he must have, I can surmise, answered in the soft, carefully neutral way that the liberal Dutch are wont to do. 

A few days after Robert’s arrival, Dad came back home to the news that the chap had been missing all day.  Much ado followed, of course, until information flowed in that he had walked almost all the way to the next town, Duliajan, a good twenty five kilometres away.  The walk was on a road that cut through a dense jungle and the threat to anyone from the odd elephant or an opportunistic robber was omnipresent.  Ignorance has never been more blissful.  Dad, if I remember right, then sent the car to pick him up and Robert spent much of the evening apologising which my good natured father never felt necessary. Yet, in the eyes of all in Digboi, Robert was instantly branded a certified nut and I had a field day, regaling my friends in school with tales of Mr. Smeets.

My post-school life in Digboi was lonely and I craved for company that only came by when my brothers returned for their annual vacation.  Robert filled in for the time he was in Digboi, spending some time every day playing with me, after I got back from school.  So, when I was told after about a couple of weeks that Robert Smeets would be leaving in a couple of days, it was dismaying to hear. 

With a brief handshake and his smile, Robert left Digboi by train.  He travelled to the North on his way out of India and kept in regular touch with my Aunt and with Dad and Mom through letters, with a promise of a follow-on trip.  A couple of years later, we heard that he had married a Sri Lankan, that country having a special place in his large heart, and had taken up a job in the Netherlands, only to leave it a while later to go back to his first occupation – travel.

The letters from Robert decreased over the years.  Dad was a legendary letter-writer, particularly after his retirement, and would persevere with those who were laggards so Robert continued, perforce,  keeping in touch, the intensity of writing reduced to his annual Christmas card that I awaited eagerly for its unusual postage stamp.  And, then, as his silouette had faded away from the little town of Digboi, the annual card did too, in the most unobtrusive way possible. 

A few days ago, I thought of him and decided to use Google to track this chap down, but without success.  Who (or What) was Robert Smeets?  A post-1960s neat hippie? An environmentalist? A confused soul rejecting capitalist economics? An opportunistic wanderer? An itinerant nomad who travelled for its own desultory joy?  Or just another gentle human being attempting to live life on his own terms? 

So, what does the Great Indian Hornbill Think of Us? - from an evening in Corbett

“It is Sal, Sir,” my guide Pandey answered patiently.  It was the sixth time that I had asked for the name of this familiar tree by the kuchha road, each time getting the same answer; clearly I have a problem identifying trees in general and the sal in particular.  “You are one out of ten tourists, Sir,” Pandey continued, “who come to Corbett National Park to see anything other than the tiger.” It was a way he had of making me feel a bit better, possibly. 

We – my family of four - were in the Bijrani range of the Tiger Reserve at around 3 pm in the afternoon in a Gypsy.  A number of vehicles – all Gypsies painted forest green – had entered the park at the same time, carrying brightly dressed, excited tourists, each talking about exactly where they had seen the tiger last – Kanha, Bandhavgarh, Ranthambore....  Clearly, it was not just seeing the tiger that was important, you must have seen it in different forests, if you wished to be counted.  We drove slowly into the beautiful dry deciduous forest, the majestic stands of Sal and Silk Cotton creating a breath-taking canopy in which we heard macaques and langurs swinging from branch to branch with dexterity and below which we saw small herds of spotted deer and heard the call of a peacock.   

It was at the first stream that Pandeyji asked us to look away to our right: a small flock of Black Cranes, which is absent in the South, were in the water.  As our vehicle stopped to allow me to view it through the binocular, the Gypsy immediately behind began to prod us ahead, its Delhi Punjabi tourist clearly impatient with our sense of priorities; it would seem that he had made a prior appointment with the tiger deep inside and synchronised watches as well.  He, like many Delhi Punjabis, live their lives on the Three-Rules Theory:

Rule 1: I am always right.

Rule 2: Everyone must always make way for me

Rule 3: Never forget Rules 1 and 2

We therefore made way for the Gypsy behind us and, as he passed, he gave the Black Crane a glare and then looked at me in the curious way people do when they wish to say, “What an odd chap you are!”

We drove on, now at the rear end of the convoy by quite a distance.  More sal, more teak (all planted up), Amla, Cassia Fistula (though, of course, not in bloom), the odd Flame of the Forest, Acacia Catechu (or Khair, the bark of which is used in the making of ‘chuna’ for paan), Bahunias....the guide and the Gypsy’s driver knew them all, both by their local name and the scientific name, which was hugely creditable.  We stopped to take a good look at the Chestnut-headed bee eater, which must surely rank as one of India’s most beautiful birds and at a stunning pair of rock thrushes by the stream. 

....and ahead there was a revving of engines and a cloud of dust as a few Gypsies took off all of a sudden.  A tiger, sorry, TIGER, had been spotted entering a thicket.  We followed as well, just in time to see the hind of the animal disappear behind a tree to our far left at about 10 O Clock. 

“Don’t worry, he will appear again,” the guides assured the tourists, as all the Gypsies huddled together. 

Engines were switched off and silence descended. 

While we waited for the big cat, I found the behaviour of others around - the 25 odd tourists in the six Gypsies around us – most interesting.  In the Gypsy out in front, two fellows were there in their best Navy Blue suits (I am not making this up), and one of them was impatient at waiting for the tiger which clearly had no sense of punctuality.  He spent his time surfing on his mobile phone, on Facebook first and then looking up old messages and deleting them.  The lady in the front seat of the same Gypsy fiddled about uneasily with the canvas fabric.  Others whispered inane stuff to each other, waiting for the guides to spot the animal.

About ten minutes later, the lady (the fiddler) ordered the Gypsy driver to move on with a brief ‘Jao’, and the Armani men seated at the back looked relieved.  After another ten minutes, the Gypsy behind us asked us to move on, as we were blocking the road (this time though it wasn’t the Delhi Punjabi). 

Engines on.

We took the lead in the convoy and had moved just about twenty metres down the path, when the tiger appeared to our left, clearly visible and about to cross the road a few metres in front of us.

What followed was mayhem.  Vehicles rushing forward to gain gained pride of place in the Sher-Darshan, cameras and mobile phones out and incessant clicking as the animal, with utter disdain, walked up to the path in front of us and then down the road at the head of the convoy.  Engines off.

“Tiger, four years old,” proclaimed a Know-All in one of the Gypsies.

“Tigress, six years old,” contradicted a guide, who clearly knew this animal. 

The tigress was in no hurry.  She showered her spray on a couple of trees, which act was filmed with great excitement, and took a leisurely walk down the road, while tourists stood on every part of the Gypsy (including standing on the seats with their shoes on, something I intensely detest) to get any picture they could, the vast majority of which would have been of her lean posterior.  No human celebrity can claim this exalted status of having her posterior filmed with such gusto.

No sooner had the tigress turned the corner than the Gypsies revved up again and rushed behind the Lady.  Clearly, she was inured to thronging multitudes of idiots.  We stayed behind; I have strong views on these things and am happy to have these opinions – it is not only a question of values; it makes me feel a superior as well, and a bit closer to the Renunciated Man.

Around the bend, the Gypsies shut their engines off and silence descended again.  About a few minutes later, two of the Gypsies reversed, turned around and headed back.  “They are done with the safari, Sir,” the guide explained, unable to hide the contempt in his voice.  As one of them crossed us slowly, I saw two foreigners examine their cameras, editing their footage, a prelude to the Facebook-Snapchat-Flickr routine.  We were the last Gypsy to leave Corbett that evening and I did not regret it a bit, for the macaques, langurs, birds and deer in the haunting light of the setting Sun were worth observing over and over again.  The question I kept asking myself through the drive though was “Is this really what wildlife tourism is meant to be and what possible good could it do to conservation?”  Like many of the questions we ask ourselves – rhetorical ones – the answer seemed unambiguous.

The next morning, while on a walk, another knowledgeable guide, Dinesh, suddenly pointed at the top of  the canopy to my right.  A Great Indian Hornbill glided majestically over the trees and flew out of sight, as we watched in wonder.  I heard its call – a high-pitched cackle -  in the forest yonder; it seemed to be expressing its unreserved opinion on the homo sapien species and I felt, in all humility, that it was right. 

In Sand, the Grain of Life: Why Sand Matters

The spectacular growth of the construction industry has had unintended consequences for every river in India today.  The mining of sand – which is an essential part of construction – has often been in the news, largely due to the control of local mafias over this minor mineral.  Most people also intuitively recognise that sand mining has damaged, and continues to damage, the delicate ecosystem of India’s rivers, on which millions of people depend for their drinking and household needs, livelihoods  and irrigation.  Yet, what is little understood is this: why is sand necessary for the river and what role does it play?

Sand, very simply, is the soil of the river, providing and sustaining virtually all life that exists in the river itself.  Alongwith another very important mineral, gravel, it forms part of the hyporheic zone, an intermediate zone between the surface water of the river and the groundwater beneath. 

The hyporheic zone has been studied extensively all over the world for the last seventy years and it is now well accepted that this zone performs critical functions, each necessary for the long term survival of a river.  These include

-          Recharging the ground water table far beyond the river basin itself by slowing down the flow of water in the river and allowing for percolation, not just downwards but laterally across large areas on either side of the river as well – exactly how large an area is recharged by the river depends on various factors, including nature of the soil, the topography and so on.  Indeed, a study in the United States showed that where the hyporheic zone was minimal, water recharge was limited and wells often went dry in summer. 

-          Being a refuge for fish and an incubator for eggs and for spawning.  While lakhs of fishermen in India are critically dependant on fishing , fish itself is a vital source of rural protein and, as is now being studied, the humungous  scale of sand and gravel extraction (along with the number of hydel projects coming up) is impacting fish availability across the country. Ironically, many fishermen, in an effort to keep their incomes from falling, are part of the extensive sand mining network, working the river-beds for a fraction of the amount that the sand is sold to the end user for.

-          Buffering agricultural lands and towns from rising water levels during floods.  This function is performed by sand by its very nature of being porous and is a process known as bank storage.  To understand this better, one only needs to fill a glass with sand and pour water into it!  This value of sand – that of being a vast storage tank of clean water – has an additional priceless property: during the dry months of the year, sand releases some of this water to keep the river flowing, ensuring (sand-filtered) water for our needs.

-          Harbouring unique invertebrate fauna and micro-organisms such as fungi and microbes that filter the water, due to its physical, chemical and biological conditions. The sediment particles, for instance, impede the flow of silt and particulate matter as water enters and moves through sand.  A second, biological filtering mechanism works in a manner similar to the trickle filters of sewage treatment plants, where nutrients dissolved in river water are taken up or transformed by microbial bio-films coating the sediments, into food for the many species of invertebrates that live in the hyporheic zone.  The chemical conditions prevalent within the hyporheic zone allow the precipitation of dissolved minerals and metals, which is then trapped by the physical filter, where it may be degraded biologically.  These are complex processes, evolved over thousands of years, and the removal of the sand-and-gravel layer of the river ecosystem is inhibiting the self-cleaning mechanism of the river, even as India’s rivers receive increasing loads of toxic and sewage wastes from urban and agricultural areas.  The removal of sand and the increasing pollution are irreversibly damaging the ecology of every river in India today. 

Dams, while they do not remove sand, have decimated this cleansing property of a river as well.  Indeed, a report by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) attributed the self-purifying ability of Ganga’jal’ to river sediments, notably sand, and data indicated that the blocking of sediments behind the Tehri Dam had diminished this property. 

What is needed therefore is an urgent national effort to develop an ecologically safe, cost-effective, technically comparable substitute for sand and to critically evaluate the impact on the hyporheic zone prior to the clearance of a hydroelectric project.  To ensure water security for India’s future, we need to keep sand where it belongs – in the river.

Reduce : your agenda for 2012

Sometime in the last quarter of this year, the population on the planet touched seven billion. Many commentators found it an easy subject to speak about, brushing up on their Malthusian economics and making a number of predictions, some optimistic, some dire. Many, in particular, picked on poor Paul Ehrlich, a pioneering biologist and Professor of Population Studies at Stanford, whose only fault was that he errored on the side of caution by predicting doom, caused by a population explosion. He was mirroring the views of Malthus, who had said something similar in the late 18th century, arguing that there were resource limits to growth.

There was, in the media, a sense of celebration about the seven billion figure. Irrefutable data is now available, many said, about how human ingenuinity is solving most of our problems : wars are becoming less, as is cruelty, people have more food per capita and are living longer and there is less poverty than there was, say, a couple of decades ago. The conclusion is that population is no longer a threat to the survival of the planet or indeed our species. Indeed, there is much to agree with in these assertions and the data presented is robust and, hence, trustworthy.

There were pessimists as well. Human ingenuity has its limits, they said, and the stagnation in food production the World over is but an example. Moreover, the population growth is largest in the poorest countries, which only exacerbates conflict, hunger and low life expectancy. It is also a fact that increased populations have put severe pressure on our oxygen tanks,ie, the forests………and so on. There is little to refute here as well.

As you can see, the debate can be confusing and, perhaps, quite irrelevant, since nothing in this is within our control. A good idea then is to speak of just what is within our range of influence and is perhaps a much larger cause for concern : our senseless consumption patterns.

Consider the following :

1. India hosted its first F1 race, a wasteful exercise in wanton consumption as tonnes of material were shipped and airlifted half-way around the World and back again, all for a couple of hours of entertainment for the crowd in the stadium (over 90% of the viewership of the race was on TV, not live, so location does not really make sense).

2. In Kerala, around Onam, about Rs. 240 crores of liquor was sold this year, which works out to Rs. 80 per capita. This does not include the vibrant business of import of foreign liquor through informal channels. Wine is an unusual beverage in India, about which most consumers know nothing, yet its consumption in India in 2010 was about 16 million litres. A significant part of this comes from Australia and the US.

3. A report on the Indian automotive industry noted that the number of car models for a buyer to choose from had exceeded one hundred. There are now 104 distinct models of vehicles in the Indian market. As a result of this bewildering choice, people are compelled to keep up even if they do not really need a new car.

4. The Outlook magazine reported in its latest issue that there were two hundred and fifty two food shows on air across Indian television channels, all espousing the cause of consumption.

5. In a recent issue of The Mint Lounge, a mobile phone by Tag Hueur costing Rs. 13 lakhs was profiled; it had diamonds, mother-of-pearls and white lizard skin.

6. We visited a family who have recently relocated from the United States. In their living room, I saw the largest LCD television set ever. You could lay it on the ground, put a mattress on it and use it as a comfortable bed for a child. They have a second television for their two kids as well.

Such data is cause for despair. This issue of consumption, utterly egregious consumption, is far more difficult an issue than population to deal with, since it involves attitudes, beliefs and, that most indefinable facet of human emotional intelligence, ego.

For the first time in human history, we have a surfeit of products, services and experiences to buy and no shortage of money. This has generated a cycle of economic growth in urban India which is as dissatisfying to consumers as it is environmetally catastrophic – more product sales bring more money to those who buy different products, the sale of which give stakeholders more money and so on – and is best measured by the Gross Domestic Product, a most abused statistic in its use as an index of human well being. As we all know, a smaller and smaller proportion of each middle class family’s income is being spent on necessities and a great deal more on discretionary bits, most of which we could classify as contributing to an unsustainable lifestyle at the expense of the planet. I never point this out to people, since they will in turn ask me to look at all those around them and then say, “ but they are all doing it, so the problem is not with me, it’s with you.” Yet, this is hardly an answer. As Betrand Russell once famously said : “if fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”

The consumption in India has gone up so much and so fast that the resultant inequality in society is engendering a mass conflict. The Supreme Court, in a landmark judgement earlier this year, connected the dots between the Maoist conflict in Chattisgarh and consumption. “The root cause of the problem,” it said, “lies in the culture of unrestrained selfishness and greed spawned by modern neo-liberal economic ideology, and the false promises of ever-increasing spirals of consumption leading to economic growth that will lift everyone (out of poverty)….”

Even as we binge ourselves sick on stuff, Earth is paying a heavy price. An analysis by the International Energy Agency recently found emissions had risen by a record amount in 2010, despite the worst recession in eighty years. In that one year alone, the rise in annual carbon dioxide emitted was 1600,000,000 tonnes (1.6 gigatonnes) – this is just the increase, mind you, the total emission was 30.6 gigatonnes. Each one of us – middle and upper-middle class Indians – have pitched in with disproportionate contributions to this in our own way by buying, buying and, well, more buying of goods, services and experiences (such as travel). As more people join the middle class, and newer products load already-groaning shelves in shops, this feeding frenzy will only increase.

The consumption footprint of each of us is now eerily global. To feed our insane demand for things (and hence, their packaging), the supply comes from everywhere on Earth. Just as most of our electronic goods come from China, some of their material come from, well, India – the Bellary mines, for instance, supplied a huge part of the iron needed for the Beijing Olympics’ infrastructure and Goa’s rich forest wealth is being decimated to export ore all over the World to feed the rich World (of which the reader of this note is an intrinsic part). We spoke of wine earlier; a large part of the apples we eat come from New Zealand, US and China, while the fuel that transports them across India comes from Russia and the Middle East. This is asinine, senseless, profligacy.

In September, the Economist reported that Chinese demand had ended a century of steadily falling raw material costs for rich-world consumers. Industrial raw material prices fell by around 80% in real terms (ie, adjusted for inflation) between 1845 and 2002. But much of the ground lost over 150 years has been recovered in the space of just a decade. Iron ore, for instance, now fetched $ 178 a tonne, compared with $ 13 a tonne in 2001, despite the doubling of iron ore production in this period.

China, though, is not the problem.
Our demand for Chinese products is the problem.

Surprisingly, no one wants you to lead a simpler, less consumptive life. The Government wants you to consume more and increase GDP and the corporate sector, which obviously wants higher profits from higher sales, downloads data on us such as, “the per capita consumption of diapers in India is one-seventh that of Vietnam” or some such tripe. The acute pressure, of course, is from peers and your own family would want to keep pace on the consumption treadmill for the rudimentary, temporary joy it offers.

Yet, we must buck the trend. If we chose to not consume and look back at the many many generations before us who made their money painfully and hence consumed wisely, there would be lot to learn. For the future of our planet – which is now in deep peril, make no mistake - there is no solution, no quick-fix, no counter-balance other than scaling back on our lifestyle and leading simpler lives, by thinking a hundred times before we buy and a thousand times before we throw.


Make 2012 a breakthrough year. Reduce.
It’s the least you can do for the planet.