CATCH THE RAIN WHERE IT FALLS, WHEN IT FALLS.
We came up to our home in Puranikoti village in Mashobra ( near Shimla) on the 8th of this month, as we have been doing every year these last 13 years. And realised, with a shock, what the Doomsday clock is all about. I have never seen our village as dry, scorched and parched in April as it is this year, and that too after an unusually wet winter with record snowfall. Clearly, something is not right. The terrific heat has made nature skip spring and go straight into summer. The apple and rhododendron trees are at least a month ahead of their normal schedule- the former have shed their flowers and the setting of the fruit has begun. the latter are already ablaze with red like a lady of pleasure on her night out. The willows already have a full canopy, the rock begonias have bloomed and shed their flowers long before their time. The bees and butterflies are no longer taking flight in my garden.
[ Flowering rhododendrons. Photo by author ]
The biggest impact of this month long dry spell, however, has been on the water sources in the whole Panchayat of about seven villages. The IPH Department supplies water through tube wells sunk in the forests, the latter acting as a sump for storing the rainfall underground. There are also natural sources in the forests which the villagers have traditionally tapped at their own level for their homes and irrigation of the vegetable cash crops grown here. The system worked well so far but has been thrown out of balance this year. The sources have almost dried up, IPH supply has been reduced to once in two days, the hoteliers and homestay owners are tearing their hair out by their shallow roots, and water wars are looming on the horizon.
The dry spell this year has exposed the huge deficiencies in the state govt's planning and policies, something which many concerned citizens and conservationists have been flagging for many years. Puranikoti this April is a microcosm of what happens when state govts don't listen and prioritise short term gains over sustainable planning.
The balance which had been struck between demand and supply of water in our area over decades has been disturbed. On the demand side, the govt has allowed mushrooming of hotels and homestays without considering water availability. In Puranikoti itself we have added about 80 hotel rooms and 25 homestay rooms, meaning an additional demand of at least 50000 to 75000 liters of water every day. This is just not available. These days the place is just crawling with tourists, every room booked, even the nooks and crannies in the rocks occupied by laggards who had forgotten to make reservations! Private tankers are selling water at Rs. 1000/ for 1500 liters, and God only knows from which contaminated nullahs they are lifting the water. This rate is bound to go up exponentially as summer advances. Local villagers do not take kindly to " outsiders" ( read hotels and tourists) trying to lift water from their already depleted natural sources, especially at a time when they themselves need it the most to save their stressed vegetable and apple crops. There is tension in the air, as palpable as the suppressed sexual undertone in a striptease show.
As I see it, there are two prime culprits responsible for this mess. The first is the Tourism Deptt. which has been permitting/ registering hotels and homestays all over the state with gay abandon, without considering the carrying capacity of the areas or villages and towns, or without coordinating with other departments to enhance the capacity wherever needed. This short-sightedness has already ruined all of Himachal's towns, without exception, and it is the turn of the villages and rural areas now, to get a taste of "development".
The second culprit is the state's Forest Deptt. which seems to think its only job is to levy fines rather than prevent a forest violation, or to plant trees of which 70% do not survive, or to grant permission for felling of trees. Given that water scarcity is looming large in the Himalayan states according to every study on climate change, one would have expected that this department would have taken proactive steps to manage its forests with a view to conserving water. But its dozens of PCCFs, Addl PCCFs and CCFs clearly think this is a waste of time. Not only have they not initiated any forward looking programmes, they have let even the existing programmes run to ruins. Once again, I have to go no further than my own village to find proof of this.
Puranikoti ( indeed, the whole panchayat of Moolkoti) is surrounded by thousands of hectares of the most dense and lush forests of deodar, blue pine and oak trees- an ideal sponge for absorbing rainfall and snow- melt. This is proven by the dozens of nullahs and water courses that snake through the forests, supplying water to the villages and charging the many natural springs here. All that is needed by way of human intervention is to construct a few check dams on these nullahs to impound the flow- off and allow the ground/ forests to absorb the waters.
[ Lush forests of Puranikoti. Photo by the author]
Not only is the department not doing this, but it has also failed to maintain the few check dams that existed. Barely a hundred meters from my house is a watercourse that till a few years ago had a stream that flowed happily the whole year round, thanks to three check dams built on it. Today it is dry and waterless except for a few hours when it rains, because all three check dams have collapsed into rubble (see photo below). My personal requests to the Forest Secretary, DFO Shimla and the Range Officer have had no effect. Just this one nullah could have met the needs of a whole village throughout the year- and did, because the villagers had laid their own rubber pipes from it to their homes and fields. Today they are all useless, and this is the story of all the nullahs in Puranikoti ( and, no doubt, the whole state).
[ The dry watercourse and its broken check dam. Photo by the author ]
In 2008, when Mr. J.P. Nadda ( the BJP President) was the Forest Minister, we had launched a conservation scheme called the Van Sarovar programme. Its aim was to dig/ construct thousands of baoris ( water bodies) in the forests, along the natural contours, to impound and collect the rainwaters, with funding from CAMPA and MNREGA. They would have manifold benefits: provide water holes for wildlife, recharge the groundwater and streams, prevent erosion from the runoffs, make available water to fight forest fires. It was a low cost ( only local stones and earth was to be used), low gestation, employment intensive and immensely beneficial scheme- just what Himachal needs in the times to come. But for some unexplained reasons, the department has allowed this programme to wither away like its plantations.
[ A Van Sarovar structure in Khorli Poi area of GHNP -2017. Photo by author]
It is time the Himachal govt. wakes up and adopts this and similar conservation measures to preserve and harvest its ample rain and snow precipitations. The Jal Shakti maxim " Catch the rain where it falls, when it falls" should not remain a mere slogan but should be acted upon urgently. Very soon, the annual " water crises" will become a regular and permanent feature, and the first sector to be hit will be Tourism. Already, Shimla has received a big jolt last week with the Tour Operators of Gujarat and Kerala ( which provide 60-70% of the tourist bookings here) announcing that they are boycotting Shimla because of traffic congestion and lack of parking spaces.
Tourism is Himachal's biggest revenue earner and employment generator. But even a milch cow needs to be carefully nurtured and should not be taken for granted. Right now our milch cow is running on near empty.
"There is tension in the air, as palpable as the suppressed sexual undertone in a striptease show."
ReplyDeleteIt appears the author frequents better clubs than I do. At my places I get only a palpable sense of sagginess.
Same story in my state of Uttarakhand.
ReplyDeleteThe record temperatures in cities during this time is bringing tourists by thousands into the Hill State clogging every road and highway .
There is a huge water scarcity and tourists far in excess of what the ecological capacity of these fragile ecosystems can cope with.
Definitely looks like an impending Environmental Armageddon!
Many of us might remember Life magazine printing a 1969 story (with pictures of course) of black acid rain in the Slavic countries. That led to the people's movement to save their forests and change what they were sending up and releasing as toxic waste. That's a vastly different part of the earth today. Stringent laws, culled forestry, limited permissions for tourists to throng at a time and some vast wildernesses given over to whatever fauna they play host to. Pristine.
ReplyDeleteI have said this several times earlier but Himachal and Uttarakhand are actually ideally placed to ensure online bookings; personal garbage laws, forestry and water re-charge tourism; census participation; prevention of fires groups...I
I mean you guys set up the GHNP; encouraged the horticulture industry; banned construction in Kasauli; put an end to limestone quarrying in the Mussoorie hills; insisted on the Snow Leopard census; completely turned around the tiger population etc etc etc...why can't People's lobbies and pressure groups be set up to press upon officialdom to work as well as make the 'ppp' actually be seen to be effective. Even that young man Stephan Marchal seems to be succeeding at his cooperative initiative.
I think we can push ourselves to do what we must. Repair check dams. Ban vehicles here there and everywhere. Allow tourists all the year round but in manageable numbers and certainly not at the expense of local people. make a major series of conferences...villagers/ foresters/ Tourism officials/ townspeople/ hoteliers, everyone of importance in relevant areas and assign responsibilities including how much money is required for a specific item of concern and work and where is it to be got from - CSR, donors, Diaspora, govt fund monitoring and accountability etc etc etc...be small but many.
Good luck and God bless. I do so hope the steel frame can make this happen.
Quite frankly, the perspective and foresight Mr Shukla expects of officers (including Secretaries) in the Tourism and Forest departments is simply not there or fails to surface and make any impact leave alone difference in the department’s functioning. A prime unacknowledged reason for this is that Govt. departments are run, increasingly on a day-to-day basis, by politicians. In the Forest department the work gets done at the Range office level and below. The top echelons being supervisory sinecures. For decades now the shots at these levels are called by local politicians because Govt. has near completely outsourced the postings and transfers of field staff and officers to the local MLA. Pink and Green paper memos flow steadily (unlike our streams) from the CMO to be implemented without question, keeping the entire forest HQ on tenterhooks throughout the day and often at night too. The Panchayat pradhans and political cronies have much say in where and when a forest guard gets shunted around.
ReplyDeleteForests are supposed to be managed on the basis of a Working Plan (which is actually a forest felling programme, hence the department’s obsession with tree felling!). These Working Plans are usually in arrears, sometimes for decades and in any case are completely oblivious to issues like managing forests for water or fulfilling people’s needs for fuel, fodder and grass. The water harvesting structures and similar ideas Mr Shukla mentions are usually the brainwave of individual officers and quietly die when the officer moves which at the most is a couple of years? Institutional failure?
Forest management for ecological balance (of which water is fundamental) is a long-term endeavour and requires working with local stakeholders on a continual basis steered by officers trained in much more than obsolete forestry. Something the Forest department is just not geared to conceptualize and carry out.
I was born in Simla in 1953. I was raised and educated in Simla. We had a house, Daizy Bank, which was the lone house in the midst of a lush Deodar Forest. The house used to be visible from ANYWHERE in Simla right from when one took that bend before Tara Devi from where one got the first view of the town. To get to our house we had to cross a wooden culvert over a perpetual and fast flowing nullah. There were obviously no cars. We walked. In a nutshell, there simply was no better place in the country for a child to grow up in.
ReplyDeleteWhen I started working in South India, Simla was only an annual holiday destination. We finally sold Daizy Bank in the mid '80s.
The affinity being there and since my in-laws still lived in Simla, visits continued to be frequent. It was sometime in the mid 90s that both our kids happened to also be with us on one such trip when I suggested to them that I'd like them to walk up to our old house. We did. I was horrified. Forget a Deodar Forest, the entire hillside has not so much as a blade of grass growing on it. In fact there is NO hillside - concrete all the way up. Ugly 5/6 storey structures. The 12 month flowing nullah was not even visible.
I sat down and I cried my heart out!!! This is NOT development, this is rape!!!
Nodnat is bang on. The training and job description of foresters has to change immediately- from the prevailing role of extraction and harvesting of timber/ forest produce to conservation, water harvesting and reaforestation. Notwithstanding the role of technology, it is the Foresters who will be the real agents in the fight against climate change and global warming.
ReplyDeleteMy knowledge of forests and forestry is limited to enjoying the sound of the breeze rustling through the dense foliage. The life forms indicating their presence occasionally with an audible giveaway by their scurrying. The growl of the water as it forays through the deeply chiselled rocks. The calm of the meadows that open magnificently without the least indication as one treks through the woods.
ReplyDeleteThis bounty will not available maybe 25 years from now.
Is it possible to manage the flow of tourists in a manner that brings gains to the exchequer, without being offensive and destructive to the locals and locales respectively, like Kabir Mustafi suggests. Or will it dent the coffers of resort owners, many who are politicians who give a dam(n) if a river is made to change course, so long as the funds in their coffers stay the course.
Nodnat has incisively analysed the administrative lacunae that plague our forests leading to their consequent depletion. Will it be reasonable to assume then, that of the civil services, the one that needs specialists the most is the Indian Forest Service. That generalists will inevitably miss the forests for the trees, due to their lack of requisite skill-sets. Perhaps lateral entry of geologists, conservationists, scientists, environment specialists may enhance the qualitative depth of the service. They could vitally contribute towards conservation, reforestation, water preservation which appear to be the crying need of the hour and the urgings of Avay Shukla. Or are my assumptions incorrect and my naivety mind-blowing, I muse.
I wail with Ind Khanna when he narrates the utter annihilation of nature's tiny spot that he was blessed growing up in. It must indeed have been traumatic.
Here's praying Avay Shukla's paradise on earth is restored to its natural cycle of blush and bloom, rather than an accelerated panoply of colour akin to a premature climax, if I may pursue his line of sexual innuendos in this blog.
In our context, what we need most is to re-structure our dated civil services (concept and creed!) to be able to respond in a timely and flexible way to challenges of climate change in unpredictable extreme weather events as well as keep course in long term ecological management. But above all what is critical to manage natural resources sustainably is that the DFO decides who works at the nursery etc. and not the local MLA. Any useful re-structuring would entail much re-training esp. in soft skills like effective engagement with local people. Unless we can get primary stakeholders to tangibly benefit from forests and related livelihoods, through instruments like payments for environmental services, the future of forests looks bleak.
DeleteHard hitting responses Avay. Including Ma'am's bitter regret and evocative openness. May be you've lit the right fire this time on this matter.
ReplyDeleteAs a little offering against the gloom I do wish to suggest, to all those not listed, that you subscribe to Umesh & Rita Anand's Civil Society Magazine. If for nothing else it carries dollops of hope and reason to cheer - there's just so much effort being put in : small places; fortitude; selfless innovation; Even in these bleak hate-infested times.
Two quick points.
ReplyDeleteOne, Carrying capacity
Two, People’s action
I do not think anyone will like what I am going to write here.
Carrying capacity:
In many tourist places, water availability is used as the determinant of carrying capacity. Water availability is assessed annually and is compared to the full potential/capacity. If in a particular year, the water is only 70% of the full capacity, then the hotel occupancy allowed is fixed at 70% for all hotels. No exchange or trade of this capacity is allowed between hotels. This model should be adopted by all tourist places facing water issues.
People’s action:
It is an admitted fact that despite long arms, governments cannot be present everywhere and act on all issues. And hence, people’s action and participation at the local levels has been advocated by almost all sectors and departments. We have User Groups like Water User Groups etc. In case of forests, it has an added dimension - the mutually interlinked rights and duties. Unfortunately, people remember and exercise the rights and expect government to do the duties. As is seen in the photograph, stones are lying at the site, local right holders should come together and repair it by themselves for their own sake knowing that governments are unable to reach everywhere.
Feel bad already; then this post has done its job.