Society, Culture, Religion and History

Organizer: Anil Agarwal Green college, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)

Venue: Centre for Science and Environment, 41, Tughlakabad Institutional Area, New Delhi

The Bagmati Embankment separating riverside on the left and countryside of the right near Ibrahimpur – Electric poles suggest the height of the embankment

One often hears about the civilizations buried under earth and attributes various reasons for such disappearance of life from a particular place. Excavations reveal the way of life the people might have had before they chose to leave their villages and towns and allowed the nature to take its own course. These accounts are available in books and we all believe the process told to us by historians and archaeologists. These are all conjectures that are revealed by scientific investigations but how many of us have seen, not read, how the civilizations get buried under the debris created by nature? There are places in Bihar where one can see the process of disappearance of civilization and the villages getting buried under the sediments brought by rivers.

 Mountain areas and communities are susceptible to climate change. This work also yielded evidence of the coping strategies developed by the communities to deal with an unprecedented and only partially understood threat. This paper describes these strategies and attempts to assess the vulnerability of the communities in each valley.

 The crisis has ballooned with economic liberalization that has removed agricultural subsidies and opened Indian agriculture to the global market. Small farmers are often trapped in a cycle of insurmountable debt, leading many to take their lives out of sheer desperation. 

Jog falls in Western Ghats

 These dams have had a profound negative impact on communities and ecology upstream and downstream. While promised benefits of these dams (irrigation, hydro-power or flood control) have been overstated, numerous interrelated and complex negative impacts have simply not been studied or documented. Nonetheless, communities and ecosystems continue paying huge prices of these impacts.

 The water availability in these projects has diminished to 33% dependability from the designed dependability of 75% in last nine years. Due to meager inflows, the river water quality is becoming unsafe for human and cattle consumption. It also suggests the remedial action to overcome the problem in future.