- Kerala needs to adopt watershed-based master planning and review building byelaws
- Relevance: Mains: G.S paper III: Environment
The unique geography of Kerala, with its steep climbdown from 900m high elevations of the Western Ghats to the coast of Malabar, has resulted in a land with a vast riverine network. There are no less than 44 fast flowing rivers that drain the rainwater Kerala is blessed with into the Arabian Sea. It is a lifeline that supports a very fertile land, some of the most singular flora, fauna and also a people and their lives in a symbiotic way.
Large-scale urbanisation
However, this drainage basin has seen massive urbanisation over the last two decades with the erstwhile wisdom of coexistence with the State’s waterways beginning to fade away. This linear development which has been along major road networks, has completely ignored the varying and ecologically sensitive landscape. Substantial portions of revenue lands in the State are wetlands and forests, which has resulted in a shortage of buildable land parcels. This in turn is creating huge pressure on these ecologically fragile areas for conversion to government-supported infrastructure projects as well as private profit-making enterprises.
Not surprisingly, all landslide and flood-affected areas in the State are in Ecologically Sensitive Zones (ESZ-1), as categorised by the Madhav Gadgil report. The Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) report that was prepared by the UN for Kerala following the massive flooding of 2018 looks at some of the gaps in law and policy. The State Action Plans on Climate Change elucidate measures for disaster-risk reduction in the wake of an increasing frequency of heavy rainfall in turn leading to more flooding and landslides. Though plans and laws such as Integrated Water Resources Management or Coastal Regulation Zone Notification hold key solutions to natural disasters that are linked to water management, most of them are not implemented or followed to the letter. A lack of holistic and coordinated measures within planning departments has resulted in further problems. Also missing are key pieces of legislation for housing and land use in fragile zones which allow buildability but with sensitive development.
Dilution of laws
The need of the hour is for a review and revision of building bye-laws for urban and rural areas in accordance with bettering environmental sustainability. In 2017, a judgment of the High Court of Kerala mandating the inclusion of a clause in building rules, and which said that ‘natural drains and streams shall not be obstructed by this development/building permit’, has yet to come into effect. Further, the Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act, 2008 — it has immense potential to preserve such land as natural watershed buffers — has suffered too many dilutions even as rampant reclamation of paddy lands continues. The absence of a databank on paddy lands and wetlands as mandated by the law, has only exacerbated the issue.
Master plan focus
There are, however, cities and regions the world over that deal most successfully with heavier precipitation in much less favourable topography than Kerala’s. The dire need is for watershed-based master planning and development legislated guidelines for each major river basin, especially those that impact densely populated settlements. Primarily, such master plans should focus on these areas.
First, there must be a demarcation of ecologically sensitive zones using existing village survey maps and public participation. There must be clear land use plan for these zones specifying flood plains, protected forest areas, agricultural and plantation zones, with details of the types of crops, building usages permitted and the density of buildings permitted.
Second, to compensate owners in non-buildable areas, there must be strategies such as Transfer of Development Rights to buildable zones in cities.
Third, the master plan should focus on permitting only ecologically sensitive building strategies for these areas by proposing new construction techniques. Controlled development can be proposed using building height rules, floor area ratio control, and restrictions on cutting and filling natural land.
Fourth, strategies to make sure that all infrastructure projects are carried out in a scientific manner with strict scrutiny must be specified. This should include roads built on difficult terrain and all public infrastructure projects in wetlands and the High Ranges.
Such an intensive and sensitive hydrology-driven master plan requires very specialised expertise and experience which may not be readily available in our homegrown available pool of resources. The State should not shy away from acquiring the most appropriate skills to implement this urgently given the massive damage to life and property it now faces both in the short and long term. A complete overhaul of processes to hire technical expertise which allows access to necessary skills, and with a long-term vision of capacity building of local agencies, is the way forward.
Global planning
After the floods in Kerala in 2018, the Chief Minister’s team visited the Netherlands to learn how cities with high levels of a water footprint are dealing with climate change issues. Copenhagen in Denmark, which faces a similar problem of repeated flooding, has come up with active cloudburst responsive planning as a process to develop the city in line with climate change needs. Though we cannot just transfer or have carbon copy solutions from Europe, we must learn from each experience in order to collectively formulate strategies that address our needs.
Furthermore, post-disaster management of land and geography needs imaginative actions by the authorities and people in order to reverse the damage already done. The floods in 2018 brought high levels of silt from the highlands, reducing river depths and narrowing river mouths. A year later, this silt has not been cleared, reducing the carrying capacity of rivers. Serious strategies are required by the government and the people to reclaim groundwater percolation and flood plains. Legal processes and bye-laws need revisions. The water footprint needs to be reinstated, and the relationship with water resources rebuilt. This may be the only way we can face a future of changing weather patterns.
(Source: The Hindu)
- India’s water problem has a simple solution
Reducing its use in agriculture is the most effective way of solving India’s water problem.
Relevance: Mains: G.S paper III: Environment
Spiritual teachers tell us that if we stay calm in the face of a crisis, our response is more likely to be meaningful, effective and sustainable. Like good scientists, they also advise us to maintain a clear and steady view of the facts of the situation, and then act accordingly. Those trying to solve India’s water crisis would do well to keep these pieces of wisdom in mind.
That will help avoid resorting to gigantic Stalinist projects like the interlinking of rivers or needlessly expensive options like desalination. For there is no future in desperately and endlessly trying to increase the supply of water. Luckily, there are simple solutions on the demand side, which have not even been looked at. The formation of the Jal Shakti ministry is, indeed, a promising step in the right direction. Hopefully, the prime minister will provide greater substance to this initiative in his Independence Day speech.
The single largest fact about India’s water is that 90 per cent of it is consumed in farming. And that 80 per cent of this irrigation is for water-guzzling crops — rice, wheat and sugarcane. Reducing this number is the most effective way of solving India’s water problem. But can we do this without hurting our farmers, who are already in so much distress? Yes, we can. Indeed, it turns out that the solutions to India’s water crisis and that of the farmers, lie in the very same direction.
India’s farmers, even in drought-prone areas, grow these water-intensive crops because these are the crops that have a steady demand. Governments, over the past 50 years, have primarily procured wheat and rice. And, sugarcane is bought by sugar factories. If we diversify our procurement operations, to include less water-intensive crops, like millets, pulses and oilseeds, especially in India’s drylands, farmers would have the incentive to grow them. But what will we do with these crops after procurement? Again, there is a simple answer: Introduce them in the mid-day meal scheme and the integrated child development services, which are the largest child nutrition programmes in human history. This would create an enormous and steady demand for these crops and farmers in the regions where it is ecologically appropriate to grow them would be incentivised to shift away from water-intensive crops.
Official estimates indicate that around 3,00,000 farmers have committed suicide over the past 30 years. Although there is no doubt that the Green Revolution played a key role in India’s food security in the 1970s and 1980s, in the 21st century, the returns from chemical fertilisers and pesticides have steadily fallen. Meanwhile, the costs of cultivation have risen steeply. This has sometimes resulted in even negative net incomes.
Responding to this situation by raising minimum support prices for these very same crops or through loan waivers or cash transfers completely sidesteps the deeper crisis of farming in India. It was heartening to see the finance minister, in her maiden budget speech, showing the courage to at least speak of the need to move towards nature-based farming, even though this was not backed up by any change in the budgetary allocations, which continue to flow in support of chemical agriculture with a whopping Rs 80,000 crore fertiliser subsidy.
The paradigm shift I am proposing would help secure multiple win-wins: Improvement in soil and water quality, higher and more stable net incomes for farmers, reduced malnutrition and obesity, and a simple solution to India’s water problem through a huge reduction in the use of water in agriculture. As we diversify the cropping pattern, aligning it more closely with India’s agro-bio-geo-ecological diversity, voluminous quantities of water would be released for meeting the drinking water needs in both rural and urban areas, and the demands of industry.
As we move towards non-chemical agriculture, the dependence of farmers on high cost external inputs will decline and even if there is a slight drop in productivity in the transition phase, this would be more than made up by the reduced cost of cultivation and the steady demand for these crops through government procurement operations.
What is more, if our children were to eat these “nutri-cereals” with much higher protein, iron and fibre, with a significantly lower glycemic index, we would be better placed to solve our twin problems of malnutrition and obesity. Diabetes has increased in every Indian state between 1990 and 2016, even among the poor, rising from 26 million in 1990 to 65 million in 2016. This number is projected to double by 2030. A major contributor to this epidemic is the displacement of whole foods in our diets by energy dense and nutrient-poor, ultra-processed food products.
This has a clear relationship with the monoculture we adopted after the Green Revolution where farmers mainly grew wheat and rice.
In an intensely risky enterprise such as farming, it makes no sense whatsoever to adopt monoculture. With high weather and market risks, resilience (as in the stock market) demands crop (portfolio) diversification. But we have subjected our farmers to exactly the opposite by creating incentives against diversification. This has broken the back of Indian farming, even as it has engineered an artificial water crisis in a land where water is aplenty, if only we were to use it judiciously.
Allied to this paradigm shift in farming, we need to democratise water. Water, by its very nature, is a shared resource, which can only be nourished through participatory governance. Whether it is our rivers or India’s most important resource — groundwater — we can protect them only if we recognise the integral inter-connectedness of catchment areas, rivers and rural and urban aquifers. Here again, there are countless examples all over India where stakeholders have come together to form democratic associations to manage their shared resource collectively, equitably and sustainably.
It is now for the government to take the necessary steps to learn from these pioneers and upscale their efforts through a respectful partnership with the primary custodians. This might be the hard part as governments tend not to find it easy to either respect, listen to or learn from practitioners on the ground. But, as a people, we have no choice left in the matter. Only a jan andolan on water can save us now.
(Source: The Indian Express)
- The best way to prepare students for jobs of the future:
Relevance: Mains: Paper III: Economy
The jobs of today are quite unlike the jobs of some decades ago. In the years following World War II, employment was generally expected to be steady and the tenures long. Universities prepared students for work at a large company or institution in defined fields such as engineering, accounting, sales, marketing, law, writing or medicine. Even during the early internet years, while it wasn’t necessarily an entire life with a single employer, people did not take a job contemplating the next change. Nor was the fresh graduate necessarily prepared for that first job right away. Usually, companies trained new employees, rotated them through different departments, and prepared them for the long haul.
The labour market today is far more dynamic. There is the emergence of the “gig economy”—in which workers are essentially independent freelancers who work short-lived gigs found on platforms such as UpWork, possibly out of co-working spaces such as WeWork, and using software services such as Amazon Web Services, Google or Microsoft (instead of a back-office or an IT department).
A recent graduate may quite likely work for a startup, rather than an established company. The very nature of startups is that employees enter with a different social contract—that of impermanence. Even the line between white collar and blue collar work is blurring; a musician or a coder might work at Uber or on Task Rabbit between gigs. Transaction costs, which Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase proposed as the raison d’être for the coalescence of companies, are vanishing, and economies seem generally headed for a more disaggregated workforce.
This has an impact on how we educate, and why we teach. First, personal leadership and independence are becoming more important as life skills. Students need to leave college ready to become the chief executive officers of their own lives. For that matter, they also need to become their own chief marketing officers, chief technology officers, heads of sales and heads of innovation.
Furthermore, as the pace of technological progress accelerates, and the half-life of skills decreases (think of how quickly fields such as software development and marketing have evolved over the last decade), students need to take charge of their own learning—by becoming the chief learning officers of their own lives. In short, students need to graduate from college with life skills.
Second, while degrees will remain a crucial signalling mechanism, real, demonstrated capability will become more important in the new world. If you work for yourself, you are more likely to be recruited for the next freelancing gig because you have a track record for delivering value.
Many industries have already gone in this direction. Hotels on TripAdvisor, and merchants on eBay or Amazon, are judged more on their reviews than on their brands. The power of recommendation is practised informally today, and will only become more important in the emerging economy. And this shifts the emphasis from education to true lifelong learning—with less of a focus on exams, and more on applying learning to deliver results.
A third trend is towards integration. A great deal of innovation is occurring at the interfaces of fields. For example, while mathematics and geography are taught in silos today, the opportunity lies in using mathematics and geography together. Geolocation, geofenced advertisement, maps, GPS, and other similar technologies are all about precisely that intersection: mathematics and geography. Pick any two subjects, and a fertile intersection either exists or might well be the next big thing. This means that learning must be integrated, and breaking down the silos is essential.
None of this would be possible if we did not have a finely tuned understanding of each other. Herein lies the great potential for the humanities, arts and social sciences.
For one thing, the dismemberment of companies does not mean the dismemberment of teams—rather, the ability to form teams and become productive quickly is an essential aspect of this new agile world. Furthermore, as technology matures, the opportunity for human creativity will increase. Technologies such as drones, self-publishing sites, 3D printing and social media have enabled millions of new creators on new forms of media. Much of human endeavour will be geared towards releasing each others’ potential. This will require a deeper, more heartfelt understanding of the humanities—whether it is history or philosophy, fine arts or social science.
Finally, the jobs and lives of the future pose new and difficult questions of ethics and purpose. For example, we have seen the recent controversy around employees of a food-ordering app refusing to deliver certain types of non-vegetarian food, and the complex ethical questions surrounding it.
Moreover, in a world that is changing foundationally, individuals need to develop an awareness of their sense of purpose, and stay closely connected with it through turbulent times and environments. To quote the American sociologist and civil rights activist W.E. Du Bois: “The true college will ever have but one goal—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”
(Source: LiveMint)