What is the issue?
- Emerging environmental concerns make cross-border environmentalism crucial for South Asia.
- It is high time that India recognises this and takes the lead.
What is the emerging threat?
- Climate change is introducing massive disturbances to South Asia.
- This is most notably from the rise of sea levels.
- The entire Indian Ocean coastline will be affected.
- But the hardest hit will be the densely populated deltas.
- They include places where the Indus, Irrawaddy and Ganga-Brahmaputra meet the sea.
- The distress is paramount in the northern half of the Indian subcontinent.
- It covers areas from the Brahmaputra basin to the Indus-Ganga plain.
What are the environmental concerns?
- Water - The subcontinent is running out of water resource.
- This is due to the demands of industrialisation and urbanisation.
- It is also due to continuation of colonial model of irrigation based on flooding the fields.
- Rivers - The economic and demographic forces are arrayed against the rivers and their right-of-way.
- E.g. Ganga (Uttarakhand), Teesta (Sikkim) have been converted into dry boulder tracts by ‘cascades’ of run-of-river hydroelectric schemes.
- The tributaries of the Indus were ‘done in’ decades ago through water diversion.
- Natural drainage - Everywhere, natural drainage is destroyed.
- Highways and railway tracks are elevated above the flood line, and bunds encircling towns and cities.
- Reduced flows and urban/industrial effluents have converted great rivers into sewers.
- Rivers are made to carry hundreds of tonnes of plastics daily into the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.
- Climate refugees - The climate change discourse has not evolved enough to address this.
- Tens of millions of ‘climate refugees’ could en masse move inland.
- They may be forced to cross national boundaries in the search for survival.
- E.g. the Farakka Barrage affected the livelihoods in downstream Bangladesh, causing the flood of ‘undocumented aliens’ in India.
- Glaciers - The retreat of the Himalayan glaciers is jeopardising the perennial nature of our rivers.
- The 'atmospheric brown cloud' is said to be the reason for excessive melting of snows in the central Himalaya.
- The icefalls of the Himalaya could soon transform into waterfalls.
What are the policy shortfalls?
- Participation - The subcontinental environmental realities demand civic participation.
- But despite being a vast democracy, the Indian state neglects this factor.
- Efforts at preserving the forests and landscapes are mostly taken up by the indigenous communities.
- The urban middle class is not visible in environmentalism, other than in ‘beautification projects’.
- Governance - The Environment Ministry is invariably the least empowered in the major countries of South Asia.
- It falls short of coordinating the ecological response.
Why is India's role crucial?
- Wildlife, disease vectors, aerosols and river flows do not respect national boundaries.
- The environmental trends must be discussed at the regional inter-country level.
- But South Asian societies are apart, when they should actually be joining hands on common ground.
- India is the largest nation-state of the region, and the biggest polluter.
- Also, its population is the most vulnerable.
- Given these, India should take the lead role in cross border environmentalism.
Source: The Hindu
Quick Fact
Atmospheric brown cloud
- This cloud is made up of ‘black carbon’ containing soot and smog.
- It is the result of stubble burning, wood fires, smokestacks and fossil fuel exhaust.
- Dust kicked up by winter agriculture, vehicles and wind are sources as well.
- This high altitude haze covers the Indo-Gangetic plains for much of the dry season.
- It penetrates deep into the high valleys.
- It rises up over the plains and some of it settles on Himalayan snow and ice.
- They absorb the heat and melt much faster.
