Articles by P J Dilip Kumar

T he article by Manju Menon and Kanchi Kohli (“Executive’s Environmental Dilemmas: Unpacking a Committee’s Report”, EPW, 13 December 2014) on the High-Level Committee (HLC) on environmental regulations was instructive, conveying the gist of their recommendations to the general public.

The piece by Pushparaj V Deshpande on “Recreating the Congress Movement” (EPW, 9 August 2014) made for interesting reading.

While no one can disagree with the Gadgil Committee on the Western Ghats that we need to "develop sustainably - conserve thoughtfully", we must disagree with them that the strategy adopted so far has been to "conserve thoughtlessly", at least as far as the forests and wildlife are concerned. We need not fear that the Western Ghats will vanish if the expert panel recommendations are not accepted in toto: the forest area is still in safe hands, and the people's organisations (the village forest committees) are fully aware of the importance of conservation to their own survival and for serving global interests. The government has to set up workable arrangements that have the acquiescence of the population at large, so they need not feel rattled by the hard stance adopted by the environmentalists in public.

The devastation in Uttarakhand in June 2013 showed that some of the effects of climate change are already upon us. It ought to serve as a wake-up call to desist from a development model that upsets fragile ecosystems on a large scale and impoverishes people who are already highly vulnerable to a wide range of social and economic problems. This article points out that we need to heed the consequences of climate change projected in a new report by the World Bank and think of viable ways to tackle the challenge ahead.