PREPARE A CITY THAT CAN SURVIVE FUTURE EXTREME WEATHER
CHENNAI - PREPARE A CITY THAT CAN SURVIVE FUTURE EXTREME WEATHER
I have written this article in parts, first as my own experience as someone going through the several experiences of floods over the years in this city, the second part of it is about the struggles of activism and policy making in the building of the city that is today and the last part is to give an idea about how all things can be changed for the better in the city in my opinion.
You can choose to skip the first and second part if you do not want to read personal experience and want to jump to what exactly to be changing in the city. Whether you choose to read the full story or in parts, please do write a feedback, share this write-up with your comments, and / or add to the suggestions. It is important that we do not go past this time without creating a longer dialogue.
Ram
09/12/2023
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ME & THE CITY OF CHENNAI
My first big experience of floods and
rainfall was in 1984 when we had newly moved to Madhavaram, the neighbourhood
was still having several farms and orchards, we had water snakes in the water
that was stagnant in the big field (palm worker’s welfare board owned the large
tract of land that now is a Botanical Garden) and wading through rainwater did
not look as threatening and murky as it is today. We did not have power for a
few days and then things became normal. We listened to the transistor radio at
home to understand what was going on with the cyclone and flooding.
Between my first remembered
experience as a school student and the second one as a professional, I had
learnt a lot about the city and its history. I have come to recognize that this
city is an aggregation of several fishing hamlets and farmlands during the
early British period. That it became a power centre due to the port, that it is
surrounded with history of several temples that go back a thousand years and
habitats that have seen engagement with cultures and societies in far away
places. Thanks to Muthiah of Madras Musings that I have read since its very
beginning, I do know and value several interesting historical aspects of the
city during the Colonial times and due to my work with the Gandhian Historian
Dharampal, I also know some details of the pre-Colonial period of the city as
well.
The word tsunami we heard in 2004 and
got to understand what the phenomena can cause as havoc, it is once in a
thousand years occurrence we were told. The fishing hamlets moved inwards
further south of the city even as the resorts that blatantly violated the CRZ
appeared on both sides of the newly marketed ECR ‘scenic roadway’. I remember a
fisherman protesting being moved west of the road, asking Shankar, the relief
commissioner at that time during a community consultation meeting, “see, we
need to go into the sea in the middle of the night, and we will be invariably
drunk, how can we be assured that when we cross the road to the seaside, we
will not be run over by any speeding vehicles”?
the urban middle class laughed in the meeting at the honesty of the
question, even as the bureaucrat gave an evasive answer, but truth remains that
almost everyday we have been losing a life on the ECR. So much so that it does
not any longer get to be seen as news worthy, unless the one who dies or kills
is a celebrity. A couple of years later, a prominent business magazine carried
an article on the ‘’best roads to drive’’ in India in which the top CEOs of
motor companies in India rated ECR as one of the best and fast roads to drive
through!
Then came the 2015 floods, I was in
Velachery, Pradeep John was our hero, he predicted precise weather forecast
that I received by holding my phone as high as possible standing on top of the
water tank in the terrace of a 2-storyed
house. We had to vacate the ground floor first on the 15th of Nov
and again on the 1st of Dec., when water entered the house from the
streets. All night moving things upstairs to a newer apartment that was my
office. We lost the refrigerator, couple of cupboards, tables, and several
vessels that could not be saved and was washed away. We spent three days in the upstairs office
space, rationing water, cooking one pot meal, no bath, etc., before the water
started to slightly recede, and I could wade through it to fetch a boat in
which the family could be taken to safety.
I remember writing on social media about the relief work and the kind of
challenges people faced. Lot was written about people having to vacate the
ground floor in places like Velachery. Many did as well out of the trauma of
the incident. But, the IT service industry has a faster attrition rate than
collective human memory. After couple of years of lull, Velachery again became
the favourite place for the youth from all over the country that migrate to IT
sweatshops that abound in the region.
Everyone acknowledged that the
extreme rainfall was a rarity and for the first time we also got to know that
this may become a norm now. ‘’Instances of Extreme Weather’’ because of Climate
Change, was first heard around this time. Famously there was a committee set-up
when an supposed IIT-M report had warned that all coastal areas may get
inundated in such future instances. Later I got to know that the committee has
to ‘’accommodate’’ real estate representatives to suit the political bosses,
nothing emerged. The political delay that resulted in the massive flooding on
the banks of the Adayar river was given a consensual burial as no one wanted to
waste time with bygone reasons for the continuous collective trauma, instead
concentrating on further expanding the real estate business. To my surprise, it
was immediately after this period that I noticed a huge apartment block come up
on the Adayar bank near the Saidapet bridge, destroying the traditional dhobi
khana that was there forever.
The 2017 Vardah cyclone was a
different story, I was coming home in a public transport (still in Velachery)
when the buses had to stop due to trees falling all along the route behind the
race-course road. As I walked from there to home through a circuitous route, I
watches the tin shed shops on the roadside being swept away in the whirling
winds of the cyclonic storm like disposable plastic bags. It was a scary sight
to watch and later to realize that more than 50% of the city trees had been
flattened during this storm. There was a
lot of talk about re-planting the trees or more suitable trees from the
repository of local biota. But I am not sure anything much happened.
Two years later in 2019 came the
‘’Day Zero’’ (again a term we learnt for the first time), with all reservoirs
of the city running out of water and the city had to take emergency measures to
supply water to itself. I was by then in Besant Nagar in one of the last old
buildings that has ground water aquifer still intact, and we had drinking water
from the tap. I remember within a couple of months of the situation being with
an activist friend in his office when he said there was a discussion on how to
avoid Day Zero in future at the Madras School of Economics
We had plans for a new airport that
will engulf several waterbodies and farm lands near Kancheepuram being planned,
we have ECR being expanded into a 4-lane traffic that has resulted in cutting
down a few thousand more trees, we have criminal cases filed against people
protesting against the Ennore marshland being sacrificed for a large private
port, and in 2022 we also had a massive building of storm water drain across
the city in an urgent manner that resulted in chopping (in my estimate) more
than half of the remaining trees in the city. With some clever thinking, the
tree chopping was done in the night, whereby the neighbours were not even aware
(lest they protest) and come morning there was no trace of a tree being in a
location. During this same period, we had the underground metro work digging
deep underground in the city that resulted in more open spaces being occupied
and many more trees being chopped in the city. Sudden craters developed in
several parts of the city as roads caved in ever since the metro work started.
Governments deny any perceivable link between the two, of course, it has not
bothered to study any pattern on these until today to the best of my knowledge.
I remember the city landscape with
the trees as the identifiers. So, it has been difficult for me to reconcile to
spaces that I am used to remembering suddenly looking all cemented and barren
with nothing in spaces that had a large thoongu moonji tree or a arasa
maram. My favourite elaneer
(tender coconut) vendor, still sits under the most beautiful banyan tree down
the road from where I live, the land that hot presses our clothes opposite to
our compound is under a young neem tree, the gulmohur trees that I used
to touch and speak to during my morning walk have gone now, so also my Sunday
tree companions whom I said ‘hi’ to as I walked for my weekly meditation. The
beautiful banyan tree that I spoke to every time I crossed it, in the traffic
island next to the Adayar flyover was chopped recently to make way for yet
another metro work, I could not even give it a last hug as the place was
cordoned off a few days before she was killed. Yesterday I noticed 4 more trees
within 200 mts of my house that has fallen due to the poor soil condition and
has been partly sawn off to ensure that they do not interrupt the human hurried
movement in the roads.
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CIVIL SOCIETY & POLICY MAKING ENGAGEMENTS
In the 90s, I had heard of the
activists protesting against the ECR plan, those days I was still in the
corporate sector, but, trying to understand the environmental issues for myself
and felt that the ECR that was constructed with destruction of tens of
thousands of trees needs probably a vast area of land if all the promises of
re-planting were to happen. Nothing happened to the best of my knowledge, the
activists got old and the young environmental movement in the city continued to
thrive with idealistic youth still around.
One thing I have come to admire is
the amazing volunteers available for all environmental movement in the city,
whether it be protesting cutting trees or against supposed ‘wastelands’ or
increasingly as relief workers during the natural disasters. The city has an
energy of volunteerism that seems to be a legacy – I remember famously this is
the city that organized door-to-door fund raising to send Swami Vivekananda to
the Parliament of World Religions and donated liberally when Gandhi came
seeking funds for his work on eliminating the caste system. This city supplied
a lot of idealist youth during the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement of
Anna Hazare, with over 16 people who did hunger fast during those days.
Subsequently the groups have segregated into several movements and individual
efforts, with the most notable outcome being the Arappor Iyakkam that
has become a visible organization fighting corruption in civil amenities
management and raising awareness on RTI among citizens.
We had our own taste of this
voluntary spirit during the 2001 Gujarat earthquake when we organized relief
material collection and sending to Bhuj, we also did our bit during the
post-Tsunami period in 2004 supporting two relief camps in Nagapattinam, and
again during the Uttarakhand floods in 2014 in organizing relief materials
collection and forwarding the same to the affected areas. Subsequently with the
massive presence of Goonj set-up by our friend Anshu Gupta, we have been able
to direct all enquiries to their organization during disaster. Many who were
part of one or the other of the earlier initiatives have since started to do
such relief work coordination on their own and many partner organizations have
been active during the aftermath of the Michuang cyclone as well. That is the
promise I always see in this city.
While the civil society efforts have
been exemplary, there has also been a shift in the attitude and the orientation
towards ecological issues by political parties. The trigger point was the 2017
January Jallikattu protest in the marina beach in Chennai. Activists
until then in Chennai were a small crowd, mostly left leaning, suspicious of
all North Indian sounding, upper caste, fair skinned people, who may join their
ranks. They were not necessarily practicing environmentalist, but, they were
all politically very articulate and wary of anyone they considered as coming
from a ‘privileged class’, whatever maybe their own definition of privileged. I
was a victim in the early days as well - when I was introduced to one, his instant
response was, “is your head quarters in Nagpur?”, indicating that because I had
a Sanskrit company name, I necessarily must be from RSS which had its
headquarters in Nagpur. I was angry initially, appalled at the level of
ignorance then, however, do consider it a kind of self-protective strategy today.
All this changed with the Jalikkattu
protest, for the first time the political parties realized the amount of
support that the environmental issues can garner in the city. Whereas most
political parties had to pay money to gather any sizeable crowd for their
meetings, here were more than half a million people spontaneously gathered,
peacefully and caring for each other, organizing as they went, and, maintaining
one of the most disciplined protest meetings that went for several days in the
most visible location in the city. Like
everyone in the city, I was there in the protest, listening to what people were
saying, the kind of voices that were being heard for the first time on public
podiums, it was an interesting development. Like Ananthoo, long term organic
faming campaigner said during a long tele-con in the peak of the protest, “like
everyone of the activists in the city, I am also salivating looking at the
protest crowds. Where were these people all these days? Often we are the same
set of people tying banners, setting up stalls, gathering donations,
campaigning, lobbying, and then there is this sudden turnout!”. I maintain that
the identity of Tamil politics permanently changed to include being seen as
‘’green’’, as one of its key ingredients.
Post-Jalikkattu protest, the
political parties started to harvest this public sentiment by setting up their
own environmental wing, with the DMK taking the lead. PMK had probably been the
only party that had environmental concerns earlier, with their own magazine
dedicated to environmental issues. Now every politician wanted to visit the
marshlands to understand pollution issues, wanted to be seen eating organic
food and openly promoting it, the late Nammalvar photos appeared in every
political party medai as a sign of recognizing the public sentiment. We
even have a Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change in the current
government. To give credit to them, they have tried to follow the current
federal government’s script of re-naming existing programmes with grandstanding
new environmentally better sounding programme names, re-allocating funds from
one scheme to another and combining existing resources, programmes with new
names to sound like some work is being done. Most of them have resulted in
publicity and not much of a follow-up. The newly appointed environmental
minister famously went to meet the Puvulagin Nanbargal environmental
campaign and publication group immediately on taking charge. Except to place
the campaign group in an embarrassing position to defend the government actions
today because of their supposed proximity, it has not changed anything to do
with the controversial schemes and programmes that it had opposed while seeking
to come to power.
So, when I got a letter asking to be
part of the team that will enact the ‘’Land Use Policy’’ for the state from the
state planning commission on 2021, I was quite elated that here is an
opportunity for us to think and pull together all the experts that we an garner
and provide something significant. But things did not work the way we thought
they worked, in my previous stint with the State Planning Commission (SPC) as a
member of the working group on rural development (2012), I was able to provide
inputs and draft the policy until its near final stages thanks to the then
Deputy Chairperson of the SPC. However,
during the current stint, things were different, there were no resources (not
that we had any earlier) or interest from the SPC to accommodate anyone from
outside like me. I was arbitrarily informed that I will have to head a team
that will have to concentrate on Urban Land Use Policy and when I asked who all
the other members are, I was made a member of a whatsapp group. Governments in
the last few years have started to believe that whatsapp groups are the new
equivalents of ‘’committee’’ formations. My one attempt to call all the
departments concerned for a meeting on the urban land use, to try to understand
how each one of them views the same, resulted in a minimal participation, with
most departments deputing someone who had no idea why he/she was there in the
first place. This despite me drafting and sending a detailed note and asking
for them to come prepared with specific data that I had written especially for
each one of the departments based on the secondary information that I could
gather already with online research.
With next to nothing output from the
meeting, I was told that organizing another meeting was impossible for the SPC
staff and now I am on my own to draft a urban land use policy. So, when I
sought their cooperation to go meet with the various departments to gather the
same information in person, I was given phone numbers and names and was asked
to set-up meetings by myself. The SPC was not interested to do anything as far
as I could gather. This despite me reporting everything to one of the senior
most members of the SPC. After an attempt to gather information in one of the
departments that actually cared to meet me, all that I could garner was that
the department had a highly arbitrary manner in which they chose to modify /
expand land use in the urban area and there was hardly any coordination even
within the department among its several wings that had to deal with this. Only
on the procurement / acquisition part there was a level of control, but, that
seemed to have been left to the politically appointee to decide.
After struggling alone for couple of
months, I submitted a report to the SPC that basically told them why something
like an Urban Land Use Policy cannot be done in Tamil Nadu because there was no
way the departments are willing to work with each other. I also suggested that the overall approach to
land use be changed to place people and their wellbeing in the centre of the
policy framework and not the facilities for industries and fancy parks alone. A
summary of the report is available as a ppt here. I have anyway provided the various salient
aspects of the report in this article.
Subsequently earlier this year
(2023), there was a request from an architecture friend asking me if I could be
part of a team that can be bidding for a tank rejuvenation work that government
of Tamil Nadu was asking. While this group led by my architect friend, wanted
to bring as much of the renewable energy, green building, and sustainable
practices into the design of the park that was being planned to be developed
alongside one of the several waterbodies in the city. The criteria for the
‘’development’’ of the waterbody seemed to be not these but more showcasing and
‘’foreign like’’ ideas, like water sports, workout spaces, entertainment
spaces, eating joints, etc., The post-social media political priority is driven
primarily by the perception and optics every initiative can generate. Policy and processes are often subjugated by
event managers and photo opportunity demands by the politicians. So, slow
processes such as ecological construction or organic farming obviously do not
fit into the priorities of the current generation of politicians.
With political event management
compulsions and most bureaucrats not being able to think beyond their own
tenure, short term high visibility solution providers abound in every high
bureaucratic office today. Afforestation is important, but, it is more important
to show that it has happened within a year, even if it means employing dubious
unproven science or charlatans that promise miracles. Water body rehabilitation
is important, preferably if it can be done at a high speed with machines even
if there is no participation or consent from the local community. Communities
are preferred when they are willing beneficiaries, happy to provide visual
testimonials of gratitude for welfare schemes. If they do not comply to the
script, they are treated either with suspicion or branded as the ‘other’, the
other being anti-development and anti-national in the extreme case.
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WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE IN THIS CITY
1.
Adopt a novel way of segregating the
land that acknowledges the wellbeing of all those living in that land.
Thankfully we do not need to look far for this in Tamil Nadu, the Thinai
framework adopted as a micro-climatic bioregional concept is one of the few
indigenous concepts that needs to be studied further.
2.
3. What are the factors that make a city
sustainable? The size of the city itself makes it impossible to manage, Chennai
needs to be broken into smaller regional townships that can be better managed.
As a city that has grown more through its bureaucratic mediocrity and investor
greed, than through proper planning, much of Chennai resources rich regions are
cornered by industries or the privileged class of people. Unless the designing
is done based on the nature and current functionality of the bioregion (the
coastal region needs a special local governance system as much as the northern
region around the petrochemical industrial region, that is heavily impacted by
these industries), we will end-up generalizing solutions that may be irrelevant
in some parts as much as it is relevant in others.
4. I had outlined strengthening ten
factors that will go a long way in making the city sustainable. Of course, each
one of these has to be further worked out, particularly the incentive for
adoption of sustainable practices and the penalisation for those who do not.
The ten factors are as follows –
a. Water and Land Conservation – Chennai needs to conserve its
water to avoid the recurrence of the ‘Day Zero’ scenario, it also needs to
recreate and reestablish its lands that were meant to be the channels and
soaking spots for the extra rainfall, viz., the flood plains, the marshlands,
the overflow channels, etc., Each ward of Chennai based on its gradient,
contour and watershed, needs to have a water and land conservation plan. Such plans being developed and publicly
broadcast (along with grievance redressal mechanism) will go a long way in
ensuring the accountability and transparent ways of managing the most precious
resource of the city. A sustained campaign needs to be managed on the land and
water conservation in the city for long periods.
b. Strengthening Public Transportation
System & Regulating the Urban Sprawl – Chennai already had a good public transport system as the
old ‘’Pallavan’’ transport, now simply called the government bus, which has
already made travel for women to be free. There are four different train
services that connect the city to different parts of the suburbs as well – the
northern and western suburban, the southern suburban, the beach to Velachery
inner city MRTS train service that moved over the Buckingham Canal and now the
partly sub-terrain metro system which ran in three different lines already. Companies in the city need to be mandated to
report the living spaces of their employees and those who walk, or cycle will
have the companies incentivised, while those who use fossil fuel to commute to
workplace will be fined every day directly proportional to the fossil fuel they
burn.
c. Walkable and bikeable neighbourhoods - All residential and commercial
neighbourhoods need to ensure that they have walkable and bikeable paths which
are maintained by the Corporation. Provisions for people with physical
challenges too need to be a priority in building neighbourhoods. Recognizing
that Chennai will have an increasingly ageing population, it is imperative that
public spaces be made elderly friendly as well.
With organized public transport and bikeable neighbourhoods, it is
easier to restrict the speeding lanes in the city traffic to a few and
eventually some parts need to be deemed fossil fuel free commuting spaces.
d. Battery Vehicle charging stations – If the City decides to phase out
all fossil fuel vehicles by 2030 (assuming it does), that will require several
more charging stations for the two wheelers and four wheelers which may still
be running the city only on batteries. So, creating a network of vehicle
charging points is important for the city as well. That such stations need not
be similar to the current petrol bunks, rather they be provided in normal
parking bays near bus stations, railway stations and parking lots to ensure
that there is no extra space provided for these.
e. Solar farms / production centres – Chennai is bestowed with very good
sunlight through the year. Every government office in the city can be energy
self-sustaining if it harvests sunlight to generate its own electricity, so can
majority of private sector industries and businesses. Large Malls and Cinema
Theatres need to be mandated to produce their own solar energy and limit their
consumption of fossil fuel generated electricity through optimal and minimal
usage of the energy. Annual energy audit
through a social audit team consisting of local civil society members,
councillors and other stake holders needs to be conducted and the certificate
published online. Individual households and large residential complexes that
generate more then 50% of their energy needs through renewable energy need to
be incentivised while those who consume high fossil fuel energy need to be
penalised in direct proportion to their level of consumption in relation to the
lowest consumer in the city.
f. Green Buildings and Construction – A third of the global GHG emission
comes from buildings. Chennai has
struggled with bad architecture and building design, which negates the
naturally available light and wind and recreates the same artificially again.
It is imperative that all new buildings are necessarily green ones and that no
permission from CMDA is granted to the non-green buildings from 2025 onwards.
The existing buildings too are given a grace period to achieve complete green
building rating before 2030.
g. Urban Food Production – Food production in Urban rooftops
and balconies is not merely a pastime, rather a necessity if we are to address
the food availability, affordability, reduce food miles and wastage in the
Indian context. Industries and
Educational institutions need to necessarily grow a part of their food needed
within their premises. All places of religious worship maybe be encouraged to
provide surplus land for local youth to cultivate food for the community. Every
public park needs to have food gardens that the local community members are
encouraged to work in and benefit from. Water guzzling and merely cosmetic
exotic species need to be done away with and instead food gardens needs to be
integrated in them. Health food markets
can be organized by each locality community members in the public park close to
their residential area or in the beach. Government food distribution networks
ought to tie-up sustainable farmer producer organizations directly to different
neighbourhood of urban consumers thereby playing a facilitating role rather
than get into marketing.
h. Resource Recovery Facilities – Waste management is a misnomer
that externalizes the responsibility of an urban consumer. Reduction of waste
generation can only be achieved if every citizen is made aware that every waste
generated is basically a resource that is being discarded. Citizen need to be
aware of the waste generated by them – directly and indirectly – through a
personalized waste inventory mechanism. A citizen app that every person needs
to have on their phone can be every day updated based on the waste generated in
the individual household (a project that measures segregated household waste
has been successfully running in Coimbatore for several years now, along with
an app that updates individual household, so this is already available
technology). A resource recovery tax will need to be levied on High Wasting
Individuals (HWI) and also the commercial establishments that generate large
waste. A roadside coconut selling vendor may be incentivised for providing a
waste to the corporation that can be quickly converted into a resource for
energy generation, while a large Mall that generates volume of mixed waste that
necessitates time and energy to segregate and recycle will be paying a larger
tax to the corporation for the resource recovery purpose. Facilities for
resource recovery and recycling needs to be created in each ward.
i. Public Green Spaces – apart from the walkable and
bikeable neighbourhoods, the public spaces, whether they are parks or common
spaces, needs to be necessarily mandated green. The practices such as water
fountains to drink water (instead of single use disposable water bottles),
segregated waste disposal, minimal waste generation, localized composting of
decomposable waste, compost and bio-input sales, small vegetable gardens, etc..
needs to be encouraged in each one of these public spaces. It may not be a bad
idea to have the government and private sector employees necessarily work in
the nearby food garden or parks for an hour each day as part of their work.
Those wanting to work in the farm during the weekends or one working day every
month, may be given paid holiday to do the same.
Based on these suggestions (some of
them I have expanded in this article), I had compiled a set of actionable items
as interventions that are possible. This was done with the help of several activists friends, suggestions from youth, and in consultation with many stake
holders. So, it is not necessarily limited to the city alone and goes beyond to
include all of Tamil Nadu as well. The same I provide below –
Interventions Proposed
· Re-categorize Land types: unless the land types are
reclassified into something more meaningful, it will be impossible for a new
strategy or perspective to emerge. Outdated sociological and ecological ideas
still prevail in the classification in the state among the various departments,
resulting in perpetration of an unsustainable way of managing these lands. Any
amount of re-regulation would only be met with one form of violation or another
rather than adherence. Hence it is desirable to re-categorize / classify the
names.
· Remove ‘waste land’: The category of waste land to be
removed from the government categorization and more nuanced grassland, scrub
jungle, etc. to be adopted based on several research that is available in the
state
· Strengthen Community Governance: structural and functional
mechanisms to be placed with the urban local body and rural ones to ensure that
there is a mechanism for the dwelling community approach, adopt and maintain
common land for productive purposes
· Integrate working with land in the
curriculum: Working
with land using sustainable techniques (farming practices in the rural areas
and food production and afforestation in the urban areas) be made mandatory for
the schools and colleges with dedicated no. of hours per week. Understanding
their Thinai and its characteristics will provide the next generation better
appreciation of their biota and its sustainable use
· Soil Connect: A pan-Department programme for the
Government officials to ensure that they don’t lose touch and sensitivity to
soil by providing an annual week long paid ‘soil connect’ programme during
which they can either work under a farmer in a farm or with an urban garden.
· Targeted Forest Cover Enhancement: To achieve the goal of 33% forest
cover, a roadmap needs to be prepared that includes rejuvenation of the scrub
jungle as well as the community based forest management processes;
afforestation with locally relevant planting needs to be initiated developing
an Indigenous Thinai based Afforestation Programme with the local community
participation that can safeguard the same
· Community Governance: Forest Rights Act (FRA) provided
forest dwelling communities with their own land access, such entitlements to be
responded in a timely manner and a state repository of community based forest
maintenance and management to be created for easy tracking of achieving the
target of 33% forest cover by 2030.
· State wide Soil Rejuvenation Policy: A state wide soil rejuvenation
policy to be created that can have dedicated funds and poor quality of soil be
rejuvenated through focussed involvement of academic and research institutions
· Land Use Process Tools: Currently no process tools or
evaluation mechanisms are adopted to evaluate Sustainable land use and instead
the evaluation are primarily driven by the political economy, adopting existing
tools with trade-offs will be helpful to understand the long term and short
term goals
· Agricultural Land Optimization
RoadMap: A
multi-stake holder roadmap for the optimal production of necessary food
reserves for the State followed by its industrial purpose needs to be evolved
from the view of sustaining the soil nutrition and health
· Agro-Climatic Zone wise
Agro-Ecological Package of Practices: Currently such a package doesn’t exist, agriculture
department maybe requested for the same to minimize the impact on soil
· Ward level Disaster Management Plan: This needs to include several aspects of
the disaster response, including volunteers team that is periodically trained
and updated, service providers who will agree and make available stocks of
essentials (at pre-fixed price to avoid unnecessary exploitation during
disaster times) during emergency, local neighbourhood information centres,
relief centres, and community kitchens that can be assembled at a short notice
during disaster. Citizens are mobilized and trained for this purpose and
periodic drills are conducted to ensure that the knowledge is retained. Local
police stations keep records of each citizen that is volunteer and is available
and updates the same. Healthcare facilities in the region which can promise
priority addressing of patients during disaster are also networked during such
times. Emergency Communication protocols are developed for each region and
power back-ups and other forms of emergency facilities are provided and
periodically repared and maintained at these places.
A team of coastal experts had
provided for the coastal areas and communities welfare in the city –
· Coastal ecosystem and social dynamics
must be central to land use design
· Incorporate the spirit of Neithal in
coastal “land” use planning
· Promoting social dignity through land
use planning in coastal areas.
· Create lasting institutional support
for community participation in planning
· Formal recognition of coastal commons
and threats to commons
· Coastal erosion and land use planning
against the reality of climate change
· Fixing multiple lacunae with the CRZ
notification
I had finished my note to the SPC
with the following scenario as an end note to ponder over and arrive at any
decision making. I finish this article too with the same with some additions.
Applications for Vision 2040
There could be multiple scenarios for
every challenge that we encounter and every situation that we want to address,
one of the best techniques to understand the impact potential is to look at the
worst-case scenario to begin with and see which of these can be currently
addressed. Here we present the worst-case scenario to begin with followed by a
Vision that can ensure we don’t get there by enabling diverse initiatives
today.
If 2040 happens without a major
global breakdown and extinction - which is an optimistic view currently - Tamil
Nadu will find a large part of its coastal land under the sea. The rapidly
ageing population average age group will be well beyond their productive age,
will be expecting a monthly dole out from the government to sustain themselves
and the youth would have seen so many pandemics and lockdowns in their age that
most of them will be mentally and emotionally disturbed if not clinically
depressed. The children born in the 2030s may be embedded with microchips at
birth and tracked and perhaps put down if they are found to be with less
chances of survival through a special corporate plan. Global food chains would
have complete control over the food habits of the Tamil population and
non-residential Tamils may have large tracks of land under their control and
most of the youth in the state – perhaps a large portion of them migrants - will
be forced to work in these lands with degraded soils as labourers for the
mechanical and undignified jobs that are too expensive to be done by the
machines. The prevalence of non-communicable diseases would have peaked 10
years ago and there would be as many infertility clinics as pharmacies in the
state. Poor thinking and planning that could have avoided this scenario 15
years back would be blamed for the scenario, but majority of them would have
died long back or retired into far off safe havens with their children in other
countries and continents blaming the local Tamils for the dismal condition.
Alternately, a visionary group of
people in 2021-22 could have initiated a bold move towards changing the
projected dismal scenario of the global environmental disaster through clearly
planned local action with ecological restoration, strengthening, adopting
de-centralized management, enormous emphasis on scientific understanding of
ecology and the environmental services and their cost, ensuring that the
government departments are not merely challenged but forced to change each one
of their steps in procedures, processes and systems in place for better
delivery of services, to incorporate environmental sustainability and ensure
just transition towards a biodiverse and carbon neutral state. The initiative
rested with a few people who had the vision, knew the science, were aware of
the consequences of their inaction, had the powers and the opportunity to act,
were provided with the prior warnings and the dismal scenario to take things
forward. They could set sights and define a different Vision for 2040 that can
be a global leader and they knew though they may not be around to watch it, in
2040 the youth that is celebrating local green enterprises, the vibrant elderly
who are having a healthy lifestyle with locally available parks, energizing
landscapes and volunteer with the local ventures, rendering their experience
and insights, the children who grow up with organic food in their schools
served free, locally grown by the local body in the common land that has been
made available thanks to policy change a decade before, councillors and elected
body representatives that bicycle down every street to interact, inspect and
work with the line departments staff and hold local meetings. Each of these
would look back at those who made the changes in 2022 with much gratitude and
respect as global change makers.
We still have a choice.
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