1998 could be called the Year of the Undertaker. And the environment
was its first victim. Man-made environmental disasters saw temperatures
on Earth touch the highest ever recorded, and unprecedented death
and destruction in the worst floods, landslides and droughts in
decades. It's been boomtime for the doomsday prophets who have
long predicted that our pattern of development will drive us straight
into the grave was boomtime for doomsday prophets. All over the
globe the elements have been wreaking havoc.
The disasters got off to an Olympian start. With the hottest
temperatures on record ever. With the biggest ever floods in Bangladesh,
which left over 1500 people dead and millions homeless. And with
the worst flooding in 40 years along the Yangtze river in China,
which left more than 3000 dead, 14 million homeless, and 21 million
hectares of land under water. Closer home, the recent spate of
floods in India was adjudged the worst this century. More than
400 perished in devastating landslides. Droughts left Orissa,
Chattisgarh in MP and parts of Rajasthan parched. After the drought
in Orissa, which left nine dead, came excessive rain and flash
floods. 1998 could be called the year of the Undertaker. And the
environment was its first victim.
Blighted harvest.
The United Nations noted recently that the number and scale
of environmental emergencies throughout the world are increasing
at an alarming rate. This year, India's cup of woes seems to have
overflowed. By January 1998, 150 debt-ridden and distraught cotton
farmers in the districts of Adilabad, Karimnagar and Warangal
in the Telengana region of Andhra Pradesh had committed suicide
by consuming pesticide that proved ineffective against Spodoptera
litura (the American bollworm), the pest that destroyed 3.7 lakh
hectares of crops. Nearly 80 farmers in Maharashtra, and at least
11 farmers in Karnataka took their own lives. By September, the
toll had risen to 377.
Most of the farmers had replaced traditional crops with lucrative
cash crops; little realising that raising them is a costly and
precise science. It finally emerged that a combination of spurious
seeds, spurious pesticides, borrowing from private moneylenders
and, finally, the fact that the cotton farmers were not given
remunerative prices had driven them to suicide. Experts and the
government blamed changed cropping patterns and unsustainable
farming practices for the tragedy.
But according to the Andhra Pradesh Rytu Sangam (APRS), the failure
of the Government's Extension Department to provide timely advice
to farmers worsened the problem. The fact that there have been
no suicides in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu, which runs
an aggressive programme of educating its farmers on controlling
pests with a delicate balance of natural predators and biologically
safe pesticides, seems to bear this out.
In a recent paper, the Union agriculture ministry stated that
"indiscriminate use of pesticides by farmers is destroying
the balance in the agro-economic system and nullifying the system's
built-in capacity to counter pest attack," and that "farmers
have totally departed from the integrated pest management (IPM)
package of practices." Outlining an action plan for state
governments to check crop loss owing to pests, the agriculture
ministry has focused on using the "natural biocontrol potential''
of the system to minimise pest attack. The paper points out that
trained personnel should be deployed by state governments exclusively
for IPM programmes, while involving non-government organisations,
women's groups and panchayati raj institutions.
According to a Social Audit Report on important research and
development programmes in agriculture, the practice of Integrated
Pest Management (IPM) as an effective alternative to the use of
chemical pesticides, reaches only one per cent of the total of
143 million hectares of cultivable land. The transfer of information,
regarding numerous non-chemical methods developed for the control
of crop pests and diseases, to the farmers and even to the extension
officers has been rather slow.
Scorching summer
At the UN's Climate Change Summit in December, climate-watchers
told delegates that 1997 was expected to be Earth's hottest year
on record. 1998 proved them wrong. The mercury shot through the
roof. The death toll from heat waves soared. In India temperatures
were significantly higher than normal. New Delhi recorded a 50-year
high of 46.5 in May. Temperatures reached a searing 49.8 degrees
in Dholpur, Rajasthan, and stayed above 48 degrees for an entire
fortnight, resulting in 50 deaths due to heat.
By the first few days of June, a severe heat wave had claimed
1782 victims all over the country. In Orissa, more than 950 people
died in just over a week of intense heat. The capital, Bhubaneshwar,
saw temperatures rise to a record 45.9 degrees, the hottest in
25 years. As if the sweltering heat wasn't convincing enough,
new scientific data showed that August and the other eight months
of 1998 were the hottest on record. July was the hottest month
globally since official records began 118 years ago, prompting
US Vice President Al Gore to famously declare, "You don't
have to be a scientist to know it has been dangerously hot this
summer."
Mountains of mud
In August, excessive rains triggered giant landslides in the
Himalayas. On August 11, a deadly landslide along the Madhmeshwar
Ganga in Ukhimath in the Garhwal region left about 107 people
and 400 cattle dead. The army, which was joined by voluntary agencies,
managed to exhume 16 bodies, and evacuated people from neighbouring
villages threatened by landslides. Exactly a week later, a massive
mud avalanche, triggered by a cloudburst, smothered two villages,
Burwa Bhenti and Pondar, and left 37 dead. It destroyed the Jugasu
suspension bridge, seriously disrupting relief operations. Debris
blocked the river, creating a lake one kilometre long and 50 metres
deep. Thousands of people had to be evacuated because of the threat
of flooding. Only 42 of the 107 bodies were recovered. The rest
remain buried under a mountain of mud. Thirty-eight perished in
several other quakes.
Around midnight on August 17, the town of Malpa, in the Kumaon
region, was buried under a heap of rocks two storeys high in a
massive landslide at Pithoragarh. Around 210 people, including
60 Hindu pilgrims en route to the religious site of Kailash-Mansarovar
in the state of Himachal Pradesh, were feared dead. The landslide
cut off Malpa and areas beyond it from the rest of the world.
Survivors were stranded without food, shelter or medicines. A
few Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITPB) and army jawans in the area
began the initial rescue work, which had to be abandoned after
fresh landslides rocked the area.
The administration woke up to the crisis only three days after
the tragedy, and launched a rescue operation codenamed Operation
Whitehorse. The first rescuers landed at Malpa four days after
the landslides, when the weather cleared for the first time. Ten
survivors were rescued from the debris. Thirty-two bodies, including
those of nine women, were found. Many bodies would never be recovered.
Thousands of villagers were evacuated. Officials and relief agencies
estimated the death toll at more than 300. The landslide obstructed
the trade route between India and China for 20 days. The Minister
of Environment and Forests, Suresh P Prabhu, recently ordered
an inquiry into the mishap.
Watery grave
This year, the worst flooding in decades caused rivers in Uttar
Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal, Assam and parts of Madhya Pradesh to change
course, breach their embankments, and inundate a vast area of
northern India, equivalent to the size of Switzerland. The water
levels of the Ghagra and the Rapti broke the records of the last
100 years. Drought-hit Orissa joined the ranks of its flood-ravaged
neighbours after flash floods and excessive rain. In Gujarat,
flash floods in the Tapti river were aggravated by the release
of water from the Ukai dam, causing major damage to hundreds of
industrial units. Over 80 per cent of Surat city was submerged
under flood waters. Rats ominously appeared, bringing fears of
plague.
Half of Assam and 30 per cent of land in UP was under water.
Flood waters submerged all the major roads in Upper Assam, severing
it from the rest of the country. Twenty-one of the 23 districts
in the state were affected. Out of a total kharif area of 1.8
million hectares in Assam, 260,000 hectares were damaged by floods.
As much as 80 per cent of the paddy crop in UP was lost to floods
in the eastern parts of the state, and 13.5 lakh hectares of agricultural
land were inundated. Thirty-nine districts in UP were affected.
Natural parks and sanctuaries were not spared either. Five hundred
and forty-four animals, including 40 rhinos, perished either from
drowning or poaching in the 18-feet-deep flood waters that covered
the entire Kaziranga national park in Assam, damaged the high
grounds erected to shelter the animals, and sabotaged anti-poaching
operations. Animals which escaped to the hills in Karbi Anglong
fell easy prey to poachers. The WWF arranged for financial assistance
for rescue and recovery work, and rushed essential equipment to
the park. Floods also threatened the Dudhwa National Park, the
Katerniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary, the Suhelwa Sanctuary, and the
Sohagi Barwa Sanctuary in UP.
In the inundated areas, army and air-force personnel braved
the mire of government inefficiency that often hampered relief
operations. Malda town in Bengal was submerged under water up
to five feet deep. Poor residents in Bihar's Katihar district
took refuge on treetops. Boat pirates and thieves prospered. Drinking
water sources were contaminated. And even before the waters began
to ebb came another flood -- of epidemics. For the survivors,
pestilence had many faces -- gastroenteritis, diarrhoea, Japanese
encephalitis. Health care systems collapsed. There were no testing
facilities, few medicines, and inadequate hospital beds. Quacks
had a field day.
According to preliminary figures, over 2500 perished in this
year's cataclysmic floods and landslides, and a wave of epidemics
is expected to increase the toll further. More than 30 million
were left homeless, 28,111 animals were killed, and over 6.4 million
hectares of land -- of which 2.5 million were crop lands -- were
submerged. Assam has demanded Rs 1,800 crore in flood relief,
while UP has asked for more than Rs 800 crore. Including Bihar,
Bengal and Gujarat, the economic toll could cost the national
exchequer upto Rs 5,000 crore.
Unusual weather patterns, untimely rains and crop failures in
Punjab, Haryana, western UP, coastal Gujarat and most of Maharashtra,
have caused a food crisis of nightmarish proportions. Unseasonal
rains wiped out the onion crop in Maharashtra and Karnataka. This
shortfall, coupled with an unholy nexus of corrupt traders and
middlemen, affected palates across the country, as prices of onions
and other vegetables defied gravity...and logic. Floods in UP
and West Bengal pulled down the overall kharif output, lowering
foodgrain output in the kharif....Exports of non-basmati rice
in 1998-99 were projected to touch 2.5 million tonnes, a growth
of more than 40 per cent over the previous year. But while vegetable
prices have increased by 114 per cent, the rate of inflation actually
fell -- a trend that experts believe does not accurately reflect
reality at the grassroots level, because it is based on the Wholesale
Price Index, thought to be an inefficient indicator of inflation.
Floods in UP and West Bengal pulled down the overall kharif
output, lowering foodgrain output in the kharif (summer) season
by less than one per cent, to 102 million tonnes, according to
the minister of state for agriculture. But reports say the damage
by floods this year has probably been overstated, particularly
with regard to paddy. In UP, for instance, central representatives
found that only half the reported area, of one million hectares,
was affected. And despite the setback to foodgrain production
caused by recent floods, the government expects that agricultural
output will grow by 4 per cent in 1998-99. Exports of non-basmati
rice in 1998-99 are projected to touch 2.5 million tonnes, a growth
of more than 40 per cent over the previous year.
But policy-makers and environmentalists can't afford to relax
just yet. A conservative UNDP estimate pegs environmental damage
in India at US$ 10 billion (Rs 42,000 crores) annually, accounting
for 4.5 per cent of gross domestic product. According to a recent
World Bank report, with India losing a whopping $ 13,758 million
(about Rs 57,784 crores) every year on account of environmental
degradation, overall annual expenses due to poor environmental
conditions in the country stripped 6.41 per cent of the gross
domestic product (GDP). It's time India realised that what's good
for the environment could be good for the pocketbook.
