DO WE NEED TO WAIT FOR AN UTTARAKHAND-TYPE OF NATURAL DISASTER BEFORE WE ACT,
ASKS PATRICIA MUKHIM
The thee-year-old Indian Mountain Initiative, an NGO initiative born out of a special concern for mountain states and cities, held its fourth conference at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy for Administration, Mussourie (Uttarakhand) on 19-20 January. The theme was “Mountain Cities”. After the last disaster following heavy landslide in places of pilgrimage in the upper reaches of Uttarakhand, which took a heavy toll of human lives and virtually left the state debilitated, it was only appropriate to discuss whether the calamities were man-made and if there are corrective measures.
But everything went out of gear for the organisers led by former chief secretary of Uttarakhand, RS Tolia, after a heavy snowfall in the wee hours of 19 January left Mussourie completely covered in snow. Participants were held back at Dehra Dun until the Mussourie municipality, assisted by paramilitary and police forces, were able to clear the snow from the road leading to the picturesque mountain city. Meanwhile, word had gotten around about the heaviest snowfall ever in Mussourie. The last snowfall happened 19 years ago. Thousands of people from Dehra Dun rushed up the mountains, doing the 90-minute journey to witness this rare splendour, in the process created an unprecedented traffic jam. The fun-seeking travellers were nearly all young people on two-wheelers, each of which carried three or four pillion riders. They were so fascinated that some of them even took back large chunks of snow.
The snowfall left the town in darkness as electricity failed. At the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy, we survived on one single  point in a room that was powered by an inverter and to which one could plug one&’s heater into. It was freezing cold. Since Mussourie was unused to the snowfall it was also unprepared for the exigency. The vehicles carrying passengers could not travel beyond a point for fear of skidding, so we had to cart our luggage over the snow into our hostels. We were told to trudge over kachi barf (fresh snow) as it was safer than the melting snow, which is glassy and slippery. But that aside, none of the heating implements worked,  so most people had to forego bathing. Some were ingenious enough to boil water on the single-point power on their one-litre electric kettles several times over to perform a body wash.
Tolia, who is also the chairperson of IMI, told the summit that the Mussourie snowfall said it all. It was unprecedented in terms of the thickness (at least two feet). The lack of preparedness of the administration to rise to the occasion was also evident in that it took over 24 hours to restore electricity. Clearing the roads was a nightmare. A deputy mayor from Shimla, who is also a scholar of social sciences, said in a similar snowfall in Shimla a couple of years ago,  which was also preceded by a storm that brought down at least eight giant trees that fell on an electric pole, the electricity authorities restored power within six hours. He said this was because of their preparedness to meet the disaster and an efficient local governance system.
Curiously, a Rajya Sabha MP from Maharashtra, Vandana Chavan, who was earlier mayor of Pune, also attended the summit. Her take was that Pune, which she represents, was also similarly affected by the Western Ghat range of mountains and the attempts by the real estate people to construct buildings on these mountains. She narrated how, as mayor, hers was the single voice out of 145 corporators that vetoed the construction proposal. While she lost out at the meeting within the room she was able to mobilise public opinion outside it. So vociferous were the voices against construction in the hills (considering that they are the catchments for the entire city of Pune) that the proposal had to be dropped. Vandana also suggested that fragile mountain cities, which are also favoured tourism sites, should impose a tourism tax and environmental taxes because every tourist left behind messy garbage, apart from carbon footprints.
That climate change is now part of our lives is undeniable. In Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram and Sikkim and the hills of Arunachal Pradesh, the cold this year was harsher than in other years. But in the summers, too, the heat is unbearable, so much so that fans and airconditioners have become part of the fixtures in Shillong homes,  an unheard of thing in the past. Now, while the affluent can adapt to both heat and cold, it is the poor who are most afflicted by climate change. The poor and marginalised have the least adaptive capability. Hence climate change has direct links with poverty and should become an integral part of the deliberations. In fact climate change platforms for farmers should be created so they can share their experiences since their crops are badly hit by temperature fluctuations.
Many of us today experience a strange phenomenon with our fruit trees. Our pears and plums fall off the trees before reaching maturity. Those that remain are infested with worms at their core. Horticulturists say this is because earlier, during the flowering season, it used to be colder. This was a natural deterrent against insects and worms. Now that it is getting warmer, insects are active and lay eggs in the flowers and the worms grow inside the fruit. The only way out of this predicament, they say, is to spray the trees and flowers with pesticides. But who wants to eat pesticides with fruit? Hence, fruits are wasted by the tonnes in our gardens. Till date, the Meghalaya Horticulture Department has not figured a way out of this foreseeable disaster for farmers who subsist on fruit-growing.      
The Union ministry of science and technology has instructed all state governments to set up climate change cells. Most have not begun this process although the impact of climate change — a rise in day temperatures, sudden flashfloods, extreme cold and change in vegetation — has already affected us and the environment. We know from scientific journals that Bangladesh, the Maldives and other such countries surrounded by the sea, will be sinking in 50 years because of climate change. North-east India, too, is listed amongst the fragile zones that will be most affected on account of its biodiversity. The chief ministers and legislators in our region are so steeped in the politics of survival that they cannot think beyond a point. Our forest bureaucracy refuses to update itself on the horrors that await us in the region due to climate change. The state agriculture departments, too, have not built the resilience of farmers and helped them to develop coping mechanisms. We are yet to hear of seed banks that will be repositories of indigenous rice seeds, which geneticists, like Suman Sahay, tell us are more able to cope with extremes of temperatures than the high-yielding varieties. Do we need to wait for an Uttarakhand-like disaster before we act?     

THE WRITER IS EDITOR, THE SHILLONG TIMES, AND CAN BE
CONTACTED AT patricia17@rediffmail.com