Cyclones, Floods, Droughts, Famines, Increasing temperatures are some of the buzzwords in today’s world. No!! Its not that they are very fashionable to use or talk about frequently. Its just that our Mother Earth is facing all these unfortunate events and much more with amazing regularity over the past 20-30 years. The future looks even bleak with predictions ranging from the world ending in 2012 to many cities like Kolkata, Singapore, London, Venice and others facing the sea shore in danger of being submerged. These untoward weather events are only expected to increase as the years pass by.
All this in the end has been caused due to one particular phenomenon which people from teachers in classrooms to Al Gore in “The Inconvenient Truth” talk about – Global Warming. I wouldn’t bore you guys with a technical description of what it exactly is because I don’t want you guys to go like “Oh God!!! Not again…The same old crap”. But the point which I would like to make is that only one entity on this earth is responsible for all this (not considering stupid factors like natural change n stuff which people blabber about) – Humans. We humans have played around with this planet as if it were a football and one can kick it anywhere he / she wants.
God has given us water, air, land everything. But we being humans, we have dirtied everything from air and water to even our land as and how we wanted without caring a damn for our future generation. Leave the future generation; we haven’t cared about the fact that at the way we are going, we would not leave any resources for even our children.
Our cities be it Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Lucknow, Guwahati, Bhubaneshwar, Bengaluru, Jammu etc may be different in their cultures, people, languages, religions, dress code and many other things. But few things like overcrowded roads, congested airports, smoky skies, falling trees, dirty water, noisy environments and what not are surely common. The best example of how strongly the Indian government enforces its law regarding throwing garbage on roads freely (if there was one :P) – The NRIs while in their respective countries be it Oman, Dubai, USA, UK, Australia wherever don’t dare to dirty the roads and the environment for being caught. But as soon as they arrive in India, they somehow turn into someone else as if showing the colours of a person with a split personality. Garbage is thrown at such ease as if the roads are the person’s father’s property.
Spitting paan and urinating on walls in public where its written that doing this would invite a fine, cutting trees to put statues of one of the worst leaders in modern history (Mayawati madam – God!!! Our country will completely go to the dogs if she were to become the president as she had wanted to) made by spending the taxpayer’s hard earned money, big corporates like Pepsi, Nicholas Piramal and others bribing many to allow them to discharge their wastes in the water bodies, use of plastic bags in the Trade Fair going on presently in Pragati Maidan openly defying the government orders are some of the most amazing instances of disregarding the law in our great nation.
I am sure you all must be thinking how negative I am. But wait guys, we really have done quite a lot in this direction. As a responsible country, India has been taking measures to reduce its carbon footprint. Programmes such as the National Action Plan on Climate Change and the National Solar Mission reflect India’s commitment in the direction. These programmes aim at protecting the air, water and land ecosystem by a number of various measures. As of today the Indian government has decided to provide increased subsidies for manufacture of solar power so that cost of producing it can come down drastically and companies like Tata BP Solar India Ltd. and Moser Baer India Ltd. can easily produce solar panels. Wind energy is contributing to a small but increasing number of energy resources. Nuclear energy is being given great importance as can be seen from the great effects of the Indo – US nuclear deal. Delhi Metro and other developing metros as well as use of CNG in vehicles has helped a lot in reducing pollution. But a lot in terms of spreading the awareness of protection of Earth, clearing bureaucratic hurdles and strongly enforcing rules and regulations needs to done.
Though the developing countries such as India and China are few of the biggest polluters in the world, India’s per capita average is 1/20 which doesn’t mean that it should not work to protect the environment but its not right to hold them responsible for Global Warming completely. Numerous treaties, protocols, summits and what not like the Montreal Protocol, Kyoto Protocol, Copenhagen Summit etc have been signed and held. At the end of all this we are still worse off then before. The biggest problem lies in the fact that USA which is the biggest polluter in the world in terms of per capita has never agreed to these treaties as it says that adhering to them would stop their industries, remove their gas guzzling vehicles of the roads and completely stop their lives.
What a sad state we have reached. Our earth is getting destroyed and sadly the people are just interested in making money and running their industries and cars.
I would like to end by this pic which is self explanatory as our actions are leading us to this unless some thing great happens:-
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