Born Wild by Swati Thiyagrajan

Author:Swati Thiyagrajan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

An old male African elephant dust bathing. They often dust bathe, to both cool down and to get rid of small pests that make their skin itchy. Photo credit: Tom Foster

Orissa probably has some of the largest numbers of mines in the country and thousands of crores are being made, but in the last decade the social indicators in the state are still abysmal. It remains one of the most underdeveloped states in India and a shining example of how these promises that sectors like mining will help in development are empty and bogus. In fact, states like Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar and Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra, which have some of the biggest mining projects, all have really poor social indicators. Things are only getting worse. 842 million Indians are malnourished in our country. Over 300 million live below the poverty line. I am not saying that some Indians have not gotten rich in this process but for those villagers sleeping in a cave and for those elephants starving and turning violent, it’s pretty poor compensation. I have visited most of the places with big coal plants and I have seen the conditions of the towns. People can barely breathe, there is a noxious smog that hangs over everything. All the water bodies are either choked with rubble or soaked in tarry run offs. Temperatures soar to over 40 degrees in the summer with no shade or the cooling effect of trees. Ironically, some of these towns like Chandrapur in Maharshtra, one of the biggest coal plant towns, suffers up to eight hours of power cuts a day.

I find it hard to understand this model of development. What we have lost is incalculable because none of the things like the loss of forest cover, the loss of fresh water, the loss of biodiversity is accounted for in terms of money but crores of rupees are spent in health costs, crores in damage to crops, crores in floods and droughts and landslides and mudslides. For those of us in the city, we get our water from the turn of a tap, our electricity from the tap of a switch, our food from supermarkets, and we live our lives either oblivious to the horrific hidden costs or wilfully ignorant. One day, all the coal and other minerals will run out and that day we will stand on the graveyard of fallen forests without a soothing green cover or water knowing that as a species we are responsible for killing our own chance at survival on this planet.

Orissa is just one example in a rapidly deteriorating elephant landscape. In India, while most of the areas where the tiger is found is covered by national parks and tiger reserves, only 22 per cent of elephant habitat is protected. The elephant in India is a Schedule 1 species and is meant to be as protected as the tiger. Assam has lost close to 70 per cent of its forests since the 1970s, while altogether, the Northeastern states lost about 1,000 sq km of forests in the 1990s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.