Where the heck was I?

Hey folks!

I apologize for getting myself totally out of internet for the last weeks but I could not just help it. I was away to the valley of Kashmir, settled around the Dal Lake for a week and half and took a city bus to places in and around the city of Srinagar.

I tried a lot of things: photographing beautiful kids in Hijaab, reading the history of gardens outside the gates, riding a pony up a small mountain, taking a random countryside bus to see River Jhelum flowing quietly through a valley, read Kashmiri newspapers every morning and becoming so stressed as to whether to click photographs or just witness silently places around lakes that I made it a rule to leave behind my camera and leave behind a strong itch to re-visit sometime in near future.

But this is not my personal blog…what do I have to share in this blog on climate change?

On 4th July I picked up a copy of Greater Kashmir, the largest circulated English daily of the valley and the headline stuck me like the arrow on apple. It read:

“Rice Production to fall by 30% due to Climate Change”

Never in mainstream English newspaper in India, despite having resided in more than ten Indian states, I have found a climate change issue making its way to the front page in bold font. This valley depends heavily on glacier water to produce rice and by the end of the century it has been estimated that the Himalayan glaciers may run out.

Sometime later I tried talking with a native guy who was responsible for my dinner. “Sir, in this valley…every lake you see…gets its water due to God’s grace. The ice up the mountains melt down to give us water throughout the year. In winter we get lesser water since water freezes…One day when all the ice is consumed, this valley I fear will dry up.”

Everyone will die, all it matters is how we live a happy life. So, in case some of you are still trying to run away from the sublt responsibility then: The ice will go away, but let’s throw them up so fast.

If you are not an environmentalist, not even an amateur one, then I suggest you to travel Kashmir. You will at least for once believe in science and think, can I save this valley forever…for some more decades…

Three Things Indians Need Urgently

1    Energy solutions. Huge number of people waiting to sell their food fraction to buy energy. How are we going to deal with this? The market will rise. We can either militarily kill the demand (why will any capitalist or ethical democratic government do that?) or embrace the economic opportunity.

If you want to know how there is the possibility that people below poverty lines who are not getting sufficient daily meals will demand energy then I would like to quote these lines from Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo:

“We asked Ouch Mbarbk, a man we met in a remote village in Morocco, what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food…We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna, and a DVD player in the room where we were sitting. We asked him why he had bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat. He laughed, and said, “Oh, but television is more important than food!”

 

2    Transport. “Use public transport” is believed to be the key to save expenditure, promote savings, reduce emissions and do our part in halting climate change.

But only big Indian metros have reliable public transport which, in turn, is extremely cranky and suffocating during office hours. Okay, even Paris metro has the same problem but what about traveling on late running train rooftops for an hour in Mumbai? In my home town, Bhubaneswar, a million+ populated city, had no public transport system until two years back.

Then we got other cities which are yet to propose, plan and build the systems. But they will take at least a decade. Mumbai metro system will not be completed till 2018 since it started in 2010. Till then private transport system is the only option for middle class. It would be shocking that on an average 15-20% of the monthly household budget is spent on transport fuels and no matter how much tax you burden them with they will not inch out from consumption. Because there is no goddamn alternative.

3      Microeconomic collaboration. Heard of car pooling, community freezers/grillers, waste-to-energy systems? Great! Indians already have great incentives to adopt them. But somehow these are seldom happening. May be a bit more traffic congestion and harsh civic rules can help.

Why should Indians’ care?

 

One day while I was pulling a serious talk on climate change during an extra period in the high school of Ghatau. Now it’s not a big thing that such topics fit nowhere in the school curriculum and you may get teachers skeptical of your efforts of helping education. I was making sea level rise a big deal. Coming from a coastal state near Bay of Bengal, educated in Mumbai near Arabian Sea and being aware of islands countries future concerns I, for a moment, went blank when I realized I was able to connect with my little listeners. How should I explain these school kids who live in the barren hills, wheat valleys and have never been to the next stop town? If I talk of sea…they have never been to sea…if I talk of international concern…you are kidding there right…if I talk of pollution…mother nature so far has been kind to them keeping them unaware of pollution. I took a couple of minutes before pulling myself up and explain.

The burden of Climate Change is a classic example of “her/his responsibility but not my job.” The village folks will say: we are fine with our agriculture, we are not sure of our urban brothers. Youths unless motivated and rightly educated will be very unlikely to take care of waste reduction and energy wastage. The daily worker will blame the two wheelers for burning petrol. The two wheelers will point out to the four wheelers with AC. Indian corporate giants will throw big words like “generating employment for India” and will pass the ball to American corporate who in turn will either feel alone and left out in this global responsibility or will smirk remembering Professor Henry Miller: like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic, a much higher percentage of passengers from the cheaper decks will suffer.

So cutting long story short, why should Indians care?

• Climate change has direct, and of course adverse impact, on ecosystems and agriculture on which 58 per cent of the population still depends for livelihood and contributing a quarter to the nation’s economy
• water storage in the Himalayan glaciers which are the source of major rivers and groundwater recharge will decrease
• sea-level rise threatening the habitations and civilizations on coastline
• Rise in frequency of extreme events such as floods, and droughts which in turn will impact India‟s

1. Food security
2. Water security
3. Economic and livelihood issues
4. Desertification, biodiversity and arable land loss
5. Refugee issue since the demographic units of neighboring nations are quite similar

Talking in plain simple words and breaking it down in more simplicity:

The islands and coastal population will suffer.

The population based on river basins will suffer.

The agriculture based on monsoon will suffer.

The tribal population amongst the jungle will suffer.

The urban population heavily depends on agricultural output. Eg Mumbai, one of the largest commercial hubs in South Asia, will starve after running out of its storage in flat two days if food supply from outside stops. So they will, undoubtedly, suffer.

So my little village where I taught will go into major crisis if its monsoon pattern changes, crop fails, has nothing to export and slowly biodiversity will begin to die out. They, despite being far far away from the seas, will become the beloved victims of climate change.