Big biodiversity in small city forest
Big biodiversity in small city forest
Jayashree Nandi, TNN Aug 27, 2013, 03.39AM IST
NEW DELHI: It's not all concrete in the capital. Delhi's city forests are not just lung spaces but
have thriving biodiversity. The forest department has released a field guide to the biodiversity
of Garhi Mandu city forest that has mapped more than 147 species of fauna and 65 species of
flora in the small green patch in north-east Delhi. It took the department over a year to
document these and it's hopeful that the guide would help people understand the relevance of
city forests in the lives of the capital's residents.
While a large number of wetland birds and butterflies were seen by scientists compiling the
field book, forest officials say that there is a healthy distribution of mammals as well. "I have
seen jackals here several times. There are wild hare, mongoose and nilgai. Once people know
there is a small forest here, they will try not to disturb the place," a forest official, who works in
Garhi Mandu, said.
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The field guide also lists major threats to Garhi Mandu forest and the wetlands surrounding it.
The department has observed that several rare butterfly and bird species are not seen here
anymore because of swift habitat destruction. People of Garhi Mandu village often dump huge
amounts of non-biodegradable garbage and debris along the banks of the wetlands and within
the forest area. Grazing by domestic cattle and nilgai have also affected the vegetation.
The Garhi Mandu city forest is very prone to flooding as most of the Yamuna flood plains have
been encroached upon and have lost the capacity to soak up excess water. A canal is used to
draw water from Yamuna for the wetlands. Sewage water and pesticides from the farm runoff are also threatening the existence of species in the wetland and small organisms of the
forest, adds the report.
The forest department has suggested some conservation strategies for the area. "We plan to
develop mounds around the wetlands so people are not able to throw garbage. Seeds of babool
and ziziphus may be sown on mounds so that a green camouflage is created to protect the
wetlands," said G N Sinha, head of forest department.
"Garhi Mandu is a continuation of the flood plains of river Yamuna and is very rich in local
biodiversity. It can act as a counter to flooding, increase the groundwater recharge potential
and protect local biodiversity," M Shah Hussain, scientist-in-charge of Aravali Biodiversity
Park, said.
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शनिवार, 14 सितंबर 2013
DDA/s prposal to redraw Yamun floodplain critticised
Declare water bodies in urban areas as assets, says Ministry - The Hindu
Published: August 29, 2013 00:00 IST | Updated: August 29, 2013 05:32 IST
Declare water bodies in urban areas as assets, says Ministry
Smriti Kak Ramachandran
Urges States to take urgent steps to identify, restore and preserve them
The Hauz Khas Lake is an ‘asset’ for South Delhi residents.Photo: Rajeev Bhatt
The Union Urban Development Ministry has advised States to identify lakes and ponds in urban areas and notify
them in municipal land records as “assets”. The suggestion comes in the wake of the alarming rate of disappearance
of lakes and water bodies from the urban areas and the increasing threat of an impending water crisis.
The Ministry has urged all States to take urgent steps to identify, restore and preserve the water bodies, offering a
slew of suggestions to do so. In a compilation on the conservation and restoration of water bodies in urban areas, the Ministry has asked the States to expand the definition of water bodies to include stormwater drains, baolis (step
wells), trenches around old forts as well as water storages constructed in and around religious structures.
“The shoreline of the water bodies should be properly fenced to protect it from encroachment. A well-planned
awareness campaign should be conducted in the localities to highlight the benefits to be gained from them,” the Ministry has put forth. To remove encroachments, it has suggested consultation with the affected people.
Confronting the issue of land encroachment that often leads to disrupting the flow of recharge water to the water
bodies, the Ministry has suggested a comprehensive review of the catchment areas and regular maintenance work. To
prevent the recurrence of instances where water bodies were choked by turning them into dumping grounds for waste
and debris as was seen in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Haryana and Hyderabad among others, the Ministry wants the
land around the lake and at a certain distance from the shore-perimeters to be declared as eco-sensitive areas.
It has also instructed the urban local bodies to monitor the water quality of these lakes and other water bodies and set
up State-level advisory committee to suggest appropriate steps for conservation and protection.
“The urban water bodies should be designated as a separate land use classification that is legally tenable. It should be
done in parallel with the protected areas as defined under the Environment Protection Act and the Forest Protection
Act to prevent their encroachment and destruction,” the Ministry has put forth.
It has also suggested a comprehensive water front development, preferably at vacant government land to create an
aquatic body that conforms to the social and cultural sanctity of the area.
States have been asked to seek alternative source of funds for lakes and have been asked to tweak the existing publicprivate partnership models to ensure greater transparency
Declare water bodies in urban areas as assets, says Ministry
Smriti Kak Ramachandran
Urges States to take urgent steps to identify, restore and preserve them
The Hauz Khas Lake is an ‘asset’ for South Delhi residents.Photo: Rajeev Bhatt
The Union Urban Development Ministry has advised States to identify lakes and ponds in urban areas and notify
them in municipal land records as “assets”. The suggestion comes in the wake of the alarming rate of disappearance
of lakes and water bodies from the urban areas and the increasing threat of an impending water crisis.
The Ministry has urged all States to take urgent steps to identify, restore and preserve the water bodies, offering a
slew of suggestions to do so. In a compilation on the conservation and restoration of water bodies in urban areas, the Ministry has asked the States to expand the definition of water bodies to include stormwater drains, baolis (step
wells), trenches around old forts as well as water storages constructed in and around religious structures.
“The shoreline of the water bodies should be properly fenced to protect it from encroachment. A well-planned
awareness campaign should be conducted in the localities to highlight the benefits to be gained from them,” the Ministry has put forth. To remove encroachments, it has suggested consultation with the affected people.
Confronting the issue of land encroachment that often leads to disrupting the flow of recharge water to the water
bodies, the Ministry has suggested a comprehensive review of the catchment areas and regular maintenance work. To
prevent the recurrence of instances where water bodies were choked by turning them into dumping grounds for waste
and debris as was seen in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Haryana and Hyderabad among others, the Ministry wants the
land around the lake and at a certain distance from the shore-perimeters to be declared as eco-sensitive areas.
It has also instructed the urban local bodies to monitor the water quality of these lakes and other water bodies and set
up State-level advisory committee to suggest appropriate steps for conservation and protection.
“The urban water bodies should be designated as a separate land use classification that is legally tenable. It should be
done in parallel with the protected areas as defined under the Environment Protection Act and the Forest Protection
Act to prevent their encroachment and destruction,” the Ministry has put forth.
It has also suggested a comprehensive water front development, preferably at vacant government land to create an
aquatic body that conforms to the social and cultural sanctity of the area.
States have been asked to seek alternative source of funds for lakes and have been asked to tweak the existing publicprivate partnership models to ensure greater transparency
Time to bridge this river divide - The Hindu
Time to bridge this river divide - The Hindu
Time to bridge this river divide - The Hindu
The Indus Water Treaty must move beyond its logic of compensation and water sharing between India and Pakistan to address the energy and ecological concerns of Jammu & Kashmir
Time to bridge this river divide - The Hindu
Time to bridge this river divide
The Indus Water Treaty must move beyond its logic of compensation and water sharing between India and Pakistan to address the energy and ecological concerns of Jammu & Kashmir
Much of South Asia is now haunted by the spectre of hydro-electricity. At heart remains the sub-continent’s unsolved riddle of trying to ‘meaningfully share’ its many trans-boundary rivers. Existing river development models, as all governments have learnt, are indeed a zero sum game: in which a benefit extracted from one point of the river’s stem will inevitably involve a cost at another point in the flow. For all the careful wording that has gone into framing water treaties, sharing agreements or cooperation models, the overwhelming fact remains that every country in the region is energy starved, politically impatient and is compelled to tap rivers for hydropower.
CLAIM FOR ‘COMPENSATION’
In April of this year, the government of Jammu and Kashmir loudly restated an earlier claim for ‘compensation.’ This demand for financial reimbursement was made not only upon the government of India but in an equally emphatic tone on Pakistan as well. And the source of this twinned nature of J&K’s grief, as they dramatically point out, is the Indus Water Treaty (IWT). Signed in 1960 between India and Pakistan, the IWT, ironically enough for J&K, continues to be celebrated as a diplomatic-legal-technical success story in the region. The consensus over the IWT, in fact, has not only held and endured wars but arguably, as well, offers one of the most substantial set of protocols for addressing disputes and disagreements that may arise over water sharing. But clearly this curriculum vitae of the IWT has failed to impress the J&K government, which has even gone on to hire the services of a private consultancy firm — M/S Halcrow India Limited — and tasked it to assess losses that have ostensibly been incurred by the State in the past five decades on account of the IWT.
According to one such estimate, J&K suffers an annual loss of Rs.6,000 crore; a calculation based on the perceived benefits that are denied to the State from clauses in the IWT that prevent the former from storing water (for generating electricity) and from diverting flows for irrigational needs. Jammu and Kashmir is, in fact, energy-deficit and according to the latest Economic Survey (2012-13), only 23.22 per cent of the required power was generated within the State while the rest had to be imported. As of now, J&K purchases around 1,400 MW of power from the northern grid and spends Rs. 3,600 crore annually on meeting its growing demand which peaked at 2,600 MW. This, given the fact that ‘potentially’ it can generate 20,000 megawatts from the rivers and many cascading tributaries that run through its valleys and hills. In effect, J&K‘s hydro-electricity dilemmas have turned into a hard rock that the State government is now continually hurling against the IWT and battering the delicate water sharing agreement between India and Pakistan.
But if the IWT appears to be failing the people of J&K who, geographically speaking, inhabit the head-reaches of the Indus system, what does one make of the environmental mess that has come to afflict the Indus delta? Historically, the estimated total water available from the Indus catchments has been calculated at being approximately 150 Million Acre Feet (MAF) (181 billion m3), a large portion of which then hurtled as fresh water flows into the sprawling edges of mangroves and estuarine ecologies of the delta. Over the past 60 years or so, however, the quantity of sweet water flows has been reduced below Kotri (in Sindh Province) to a peak (in the three monsoon months) of about 34.8 MAF (43 billion m3), with barely 20 MAF reaching the mangroves. In effect, fresh water flows have been steadily slurped off in the flood plains, with diversions for agriculture and industry and reservoirs holding back volumes for power generation. Importantly as well, instead of the 400 million tonnes of nutrient rich fine grained soil that used to annually nourish the delta, there is now barely a 100 million or so tonnes of soil washing up along the coasts.
DISASTROUS IMPLICATIONS
The long-term consequences of this water and soil squeeze on the delta are yet to be fully understood as an environmental phenomena. In fact in 2000-01, the flow downstream of Kotri (Sindh Province) was recorded as an unprecedented ‘nil’. Only a few recent studies (such as A. Amjad et al, ‘Degradation of Indus Delta Mangroves…’ International Journal of Geology, 2007) have taken note of the potentially disastrous implications from dying fisheries, coastal erosion, mangrove destruction and an increase in sea water ingress into the coastal regions.
What does one make of this simultaneous failing and success of the IWT in the head-reaches and tail ends respectively of the Indus system? And equally, as well, how will this perplexing developmental and environmental conundrum impact future India-Pakistan dialogue and the peace process in the region? This riddle, it could be persuasively argued, has been, paradoxically enough, constructed not only by the context of the IWT but, significantly as well, by the peculiarities of the ‘knowledge regime’ that has largely informed trans-boundary river management in the subcontinent.
The IWT was too simplistically (though perhaps appealing in its time) based on an engineering formula which ‘divided’ the Indus rivers (Western streams to Pakistan and Eastern branches to India), rather than treating the river system as an organic entity that was ecologically linked and environmentally viable only as a connected phenomena. Secondly, managing the IWT has been kept confined to the limited knowledge resources generated by a thin sliver of civil engineers, state managers and ideas borne out of diplomatic intrigue.
Thus, if the IWT is to be saved from a political cul de sac, as far as J&K’s energy crisis is concerned and from a potential environmental collapse in the delta, the treaty and its weighty technical arrangements have to be moved beyond the zero sum logics of dividing waters. Instead, a policy architecture needs to be designed that allows and enables economic and environmental ‘transactions’ within the Indus system. Put differently, rather than stoking a politics of compensation based on narrower or opportunistic readings of the IWT’s many clauses and annexures, the way ahead would be to craft a credible ecologically based cost benefit model that acknowledges the Indus rivers as an organic hydraulic system: made up of fluvial interconnections.
Thus, if the head waters need to be preserved to sustain ecological functions within the flood plains and the delta, a case could be made to pay-off sections in the head reaches either through the transfer of hydro-electricity or commensurate financial packages. Similarly, if the head reaches or catchments of the Indus system are recognised for the range of ecosystem services that they deliver lower down the system then the latter must be expected to be conserved as a viable environmental entity.
EXCELLENT CASE FOR REWARD
Put differently, the government of J&K could make an excellent case for being ‘rewarded’ for preserving its rivers for their potential eco-system services enjoyed by downstream users rather than having to claim compensation for presumed ‘lost’ development benefits. The model of development, hence for the catchment, would be recognised as involving different priorities than the flood plains and the delta.
By allowing such kinds of ecologically calculated cost-benefit transactions across the Indus system, India and Pakistan can turn volatile environmental limits into both economic opportunity and political possibility. The way forward is to harness new knowledge on river ecology, de-centre the civil engineering mindset and craft fresh decision-making collectives that draw upon cultures and traditions of river management in the region.
(Rohan D’Souza is Assistant Professor, Centre for Studies in Science Policy, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
)
)
A high-level let-down - The Hindu
A high-level let-down - The Hindu
A high-level let-down - The Hindu
OMISSION: The report fails to explicitly recommend a drastic reduction in the present consumption levels of the rich. Without this, the poor will never have the space needed to become more secure and prosperous. The picture shows the Dharavi area in Mumbai. File photo
A high-level let-down - The Hindu
A high-level let-down
OMISSION: The report fails to explicitly recommend a drastic reduction in the present consumption levels of the rich. Without this, the poor will never have the space needed to become more secure and prosperous. The picture shows the Dharavi area in Mumbai. File photo
A recent U.N. report on sustainable development is soft on big business and private investments, making sustainability, equity and well-being difficult to achieve
The Millennium Development Goals (MDG), set in 2000, promised a world with dramatically less poverty, hunger, oppression, and environmental damage by 2015. Even as debate on their success or failure rages, there is widespread recognition of the need for a fresh approach after 2015. Meanwhile, the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development has also taken place in 2012 and there is a strong demand for ecological sustainability to be a fulcrum of the post-2015 agenda.
The positives
This is the focus of a recently-released report, “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty And Transform Economies Through Sustainable Development.” Authored by the U.N. Secretary-General’s High Level Panel of Eminent Persons (chaired by the Presidents or Prime Ministers of Indonesia, Liberia and United Kingdom), it has several positive elements: eradicating extreme poverty, reaching basic entitlements to all, integrating the objectives of development, environment and equity (including gender), enhancing jobs and livelihoods, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, and achieving sustainable production and consumption.
Unfortunately, the report does not deal with structural roots of poverty, malnutrition, unsustainability and inequities, or answer why so many hundreds of millions of people still suffer from these. It does not analyse why Agenda 21, forged in 1992 as a bold and practical vision of how the world could be a better place by the 21st millennium, has been forgotten. These failures of diagnosis lead to recommendations that are not transformative enough to achieve sustainability, equity, and well-being.
The report stresses accountability and transparency in governance, but does not recommend direct democracy. Power in such a polity would flow upwards from communities in face-to-face settings, enabling greater accountability and transparency than possible in representative democracy. The report says: “People … want more of a say in how they are governed.” However, people need to be central to governance; as the village of Mendha-Lekha in central India says, “we elect the government in Delhi and Mumbai, but we are the government in our village.”
On growth
Disappointingly, the report does not see the inherent contradiction between the earth’s ecological limits and unending economic growth. Instead, there is repeated talk of “accelerated growth.” Given that human activity has already crossed several planetary limits (leading, for instance, to the climate crisis), we may need global degrowth, along with radical redistribution so that countries/regions thus far deprived can gain without further threatening the earth. The focus should be on increasing livelihood security, access to basic needs, health and learning … which itself can lead to meaningful growth. GDP as the standard measure of “development” has to be replaced by a basket of well-being indicators, both quantifiable and qualitative. Sadly, the report fails to explicitly recommend a drastic reduction in the present consumption levels of the rich. Without this, the poor will never have the space needed to become more secure and genuinely prosperous.
Corporate sector
This failure is linked to an excessively, soft approach towards big business. Not once does the report mention the need to penalise the corporate sector’s irresponsible behaviour towards the earth and people. There is a focus on private investments, and a faith in “free” markets and market mechanisms (e.g. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), which seem highly misplaced. Instead, no confidence is put into turning over manufacture, business and markets towards community, worker and consumer controls.
Knowledge forms
The report fails to acknowledge the diverse forms of knowledge that have sustained human societies for millennia, with only modern science being highlighted. In the goal on health care, traditional and community-based health systems are completely absent; in agriculture, the same with farmer-based R&D. Synergistic use of diverse knowledge systems is crucial to successful initiatives around the world, so this gap is surprising. Equally surprising is the omission of cultural diversity, ethical values (towards fellow humans and the rest of nature), and opportunities for personal spiritual depth. The links between culture, knowledge, sustainability, and equity (including nature’s inherent rights) have to be core parts of the post-2015 agenda.
The report is heavily biased towards urban areas, with statements such as “cities are the world’s engines for business and innovation … the only locale where it is possible to generate the number of good jobs that young people are seeking.”
This is false, given that villages have been sources of enormous innovation (we would all be starving to death if it had not been for the creativity of farmers), and that rural revitalisation has often been a significant employment generator. Examples across the world testify to the possibilities of relative self-reliance through decentralised, democratic economies, which dramatically cut unsustainable transportation, empower people to be in control of their own lives, democratise markets, and provide a stable basis for wider socio-economic and political relations across communities and countries. Indeed, through such initiatives, it has even been possible to reverse distress migration of villagers into cities.
Governance
The report also ignores the need to change the current system of global governance to be far more responsive to the peoples of the world, rather than concentrate all decision-making power in national governments. A new global governance would also prioritise environmental agreements and human rights instruments over finance, trade, and commerce agreements.
Overall, the high-level panel report is about reforms within the existing system of financial, corporate, and nation-state control. Such reforms could be interim measures, but a truly sustainable and equitable future needs far more radical transformations towards community-centred pathways of development and governance.
(Ashish Kothari is with Kalpavriksh. E-mail: ashishkothari@vsnl.com)
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