Prerna Singh Bindra is a well-known voice in the environment sector as a journalist with a finger on the pulse of the problem. This hard-hitting book from her ‘reveals the dark side of the country’s undisciplined pursuit of growth’, as George Schaller notes.
We see the rapid transformation of our immediate environment every day—that mynah in the tree across the street can no longer be seen, the tree has been whittled down to a decorative shape to match the plan drawing of the housing complex that is coming up behind it. Soon, it is no longer a real tree. Bindra gives umpteen such examples, with names of places, species and dates, to point out almost in every page how India’s wildlife is vanishing. In the island called United Kingdom, not a hare or deer or bird can be seen today, they have hunted out everything to make it ‘safe’ for mankind. India is not far behind.
Bindra puts India’s ‘ecosystem service’ at Rs 600,000 crore. That is forests creating watersheds, bees pollinating and such other unaccounted for services, and tells us that the depletion of the ecosystem is happening so rapidly that 14,000 sq km of forests have been diverted for 23,716 infrastructure and industrial needs in the last thirty years. The ‘no’rate for forest diversion is 0.032 per cent. And animals have no space to breath.
The existing environment protection laws of the country were being tampered with and whittled away since the Manmohan Singh-led ‘economic reforms’ began in the early 1990s. Within the first few months of the Modi government coming to power, the government decided to ‘review’ these laws as these laws were being seen as ‘obstructions’ to development and national growth. The mandate of the Ministry of Environment dramatically changed from being a ministry that protects forests, rivers, animals to one that gives ‘ c l e a r a n c e ’ speedily to projects, that is, a ministry that waves the ‘green’ flag for highways and railway lines cutting through tiger reserves and elephant corridors, to cable cars to immersion of biodiversity of hotspots and many many other transgressions against the vandevata. MoEF clearance is at the rate of 650 projects in one year.
India is a country that has traditionally for a million years seen the forest worshipped as god, animals defined as vahanas or avataars of gods, rivers as mother, the land as the parent. For such a country to have enacted the ‘vanishing’ of biodiversity, the nation’s green assets, in just seventy years is a feat. Bindra’s book tells us how this has been effected and of the avid assent of beaureucrats, ministers, experts, specialists and the common Indian who never raises his/her voice against ‘development’ of this kind that tears asunder the country’s ecosystem. The Elephants of the North-East are only on picture post cards, too distant for a candle-light vigil at India Gate. There is a very interesting chapter on how the National Board of Wildlife has been rendered impotent and one on the ‘sounds of silence’, how the chirping of the sparrow has been killed by the whirling urban fan blade or the death of biophony in our surroundings. Bindra quotes Bernie Krause from the book The Great Animal Orchestra, ‘A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening…’, you only have to be on a Delhi road at 8.30 am to know what we mean. India is perhaps no longer a country in which Pawan paani dharti aakash ghar mandar harbani, as the Guru Granth Sahib tells us. At a time when the debate on development versus ecology has panned out sadly with the death of the Narmada Bachao Movement, to say that a book like this should be in every hand is saying too little too late.