Aishwarya Padmanabhan- 21st Century Paradigms: Resource Scarcity & Environment Degradation

Two the most important and dormant problems of the country are scarcity of resources and increase in pollution. These issues although of great importance tend to be put on the back burner by the authorities.

Few in India can deny that India is facing an intense crisis of resources. There is intense competition for the nation's limited natural resources. Our land and water resources are being exploited to the hilt. The exploitation of our mineral resources is threatening our forests, nature reserves, and general ecology. Seventy percent of our energy resources need to be imported putting constant pressure on us to export more or face currency devaluation. Over use of resources is contributing to natural disasters occurring more frequently and with greater devastation. For many Indians, life is a big struggle just to put together the bare essentials for survival, and shortages of resources works most against the poor and underprivileged. Even as sections of India's middle-class struggle with scarcities - it is the poor and vulnerable sections of society who suffer most. It is true that better management of resources could reduce this problem - that states like Gujarat and Rajasthan have neglected traditional water-harvesting methods that could be vital to augment scarce water resources. Others have argued that if the Narmada project were to be completed in some acceptable form, it could alleviate such problems in the future. But even with appropriate development schemes and optimum utilization of scarce resources, it would be hard to argue, that on a per capita basis, India's natural resources are not becoming severely strained.

So far, these resources have been shared in a very unequal way. Some Indians have the luxury of taking long showers twice or thrice a day - even their pets are bathed daily, and their cars scrubbed from top to bottom. Other Indians are lucky if they get to bathe once a week. And many Indians are lucky just to have access to clean drinking water. If in the future, India were to become a more egalitarian nation, and attempt to share its water-resources in a fairer and more just way, it is evident that with projected population growth rates, it is unlikely that every Indian citizen will have access to a reasonable amount of water every day. The same would be true of other precious resources like land, energy and scarce minerals. The focus has thus over the past few years shifted to optimum and efficient utilization of resources so as to save the existing natural resources for the future generations.

India just like China too has serious problem with pollution. Unfortunately not only is the country's economy on a growing trend but also the country's pollution and mostly affected are rivers as they have almost become garbage dumps. About 80 % of urban waste in India ends up in rivers where it destroys river ecosystems and it also makes bodies of water unfit for human use, not to mention the fact that many river species populations are falling rapidly and if this trend continues these rivers could soon become dead rivers. Untreated sewage often ends up in rivers and testing of the water from the Ganges River near Varanasi showed that levels of fecal chloroform, a dangerous bacterium that comes from untreated sewage, were about 3,000 percent higher than what is considered safe for bathing. This is of course causing many illnesses. It also has to be said that India invested lots of money in clean-up efforts, especially in area of New Delhi, but that isn't enough considering the rapid growth of population in India and it hasn't resulted in any cleaner water. The worst fact is that water-borne diseases are India's leading cause of child mortalityAir is also polluted in India almost as much as in China and some experts believe that smog from India and China could even change weather patterns in North America. Even the famous Taj Mahal is becoming more and more yellow because of tremendous air pollution.India is already facing massive environmental damage and environment isn't the only victim of this story. Many deaths and diseases of human population are already caused as the result of air and water pollution and many more will follow unless something is done. But what can be done, what is the right solution? Hard to say, maybe to try lifting ecological conscience and awareness of the population, but that's very hard to achieve among rural and uneducated population. It's really now or never for the Indian government to come up with the plan to save the environment before it goes out of their reach.

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The Author is a I yr Journalism Honours student and part of the Webteam of DevelopmentChannel.org