Lessons we must learn from Kotrupi tragedy:

Wanted a new, 'green' agenda of development

The Kotrupi tragedy is heart-rending. Imagine the entire hill sliding and cascading down with tons of muck, boulders and trees and wreaking death and destruction of such huge proportions. Grim and chilling as it is, it speaks of the shape of things to come in future. It is both a reminder and a lesson which we will choose to neglect at our own peril: Nature neither forgives nor forgets. If we tinker and mess with it, take undue liberties, fell trees, hack the hills, blast them, dynamite them, mine them, then be ready for catastrophes. Quite obviously, the Kotrupi’s is less a natural disaster and more a man-made one.

Therefore, unless we mend our ways, unless we reorient, redesign, refashion our flawed developmental models, such unfortunate disasters will keep on happening. So long as the construction activities of all kinds – buildings, roads, bridges, tunnels, dams for hydroelectricity - will be planned, designed and executed in the usual shoddy, unscientific manner without the least regard to the strata, geology, hill slope, ecological viability, sustainability, proper disposal of debris, such disasters will recur with only greater intensity and frequency. Until and unless in our mindless race towards urbanisation we don’t evolve eco-friendly pathways and learn to respect mother nature and live in harmony with it, such gory stories of death and destruction will keep on revisiting us. So long as we don’t shed our hubris and contractor-like mind-set of “just build; damn the environment, damn the fragile nature of the hills, damn the environmental fall-out” - nature, furious and frustrated, sick and tired, unable to bear it any more - will strike again and again. So long as the governments will let illegal, unauthorized and wilful constructions defying laws and norms go on and on and even regularise them for selfish electoral gains caring two hoots for ecology and environment, these tragic dramas will keep on happening.  Millions of rupees of tax payers’ hard earned money would keep on getting spent on building and creating ecologically unsustainable roads, seismically unfit edifices and all kinds of faulty infrastructure, and then many more millions would be spent on the relief and rescue missions and rebuilding  what has been lost, post calamity. And thus vicious cycle of death, destruction, economic and environmental loss would keep on repeating itself.

Therefore the need of the hour is to have a serious rethink, a complete overhaul of our mind-sets. Let a new crop of 'green' polticians now take over. Let there be a complete switch-over to an ecologically robust, environment-friendly, ‘green’ agenda of development. No other state needs it more urgently and immediately than our hill state: Himachal Pradesh.

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Where are "Palampur will be a district" rumour-mongers?

                                          

What happened to the buzz, noise and bluster about Palampur being declared a district on the Independence Day? A typical case of bang ending in a whimper? Well, I for one, shed no tears over it. Palampur has been spared further erosion of its ecology. No deodars, pines, tuhnis, beeuls, bauhinias, jacarandas, and other trees that dot this valley will come under the axe in the name of making it a district. No tea gardens will be erased. No JCBs and earth-moving machines will reverberate and echo around us. No hill slopes will be cut, nor will mounds of soil, rock, stone and boulder be dumped on the banks of our already choked khuds. Palampur, already showing signs of environmental stress, has been spared some more life with relatively better green cover, better air quality, some sanity, some tranquillity and less pollution, less congestion. But for how long? Anyway, so far so good.

जीणा काँगड़े दा 

How green is my valley!

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