Water, Land Degradation

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday made a very significant plea for greater South-South cooperation to address the alarming issues of climate change, desertification and land degradation. At the same time he also called for a global action agenda on water. It is an undeniable fact that the issues of climate change, desertification, global warming, air and water pollution, and land degradation are all inter-related, one leading to the other and vice versa. Modi’s prescription of a global water action agenda, as he has made it clear, is at the heart of achieving ‘Land Degradation Neutrality’, and such an action agenda was required urgently in view of the fact that land degradation has already affected two-thirds of the countries across the world. Prime Minister Modi was speaking at the fourteenth edition of the ‘Conference of Parties’ to the ‘United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification’, held at Noida near the national capital, during which he also stressed on the need to enhance water recharge and retention of moisture of soil as part of a holistic approach to land and water management on the global scale. The Prime Minister’s clarion call at the global forum, however, needs to be also seen at the regional level, particularly in the Northeast, where degradation of land and water has been occurring at a very fast pace. Rapid reduction of forest cover due to illegal and indiscriminate felling of trees and cutting of earth particularly in the hill States has already caused massive degradation to the rivers of the region. The issue of rapid rising of river-beds, particularly of the Brahmaputra, the Barak and its major tributaries, and bank erosion caused by most rivers and tributaries need to be seen in the above-mentioned perspective pointed out by the Prime Minister. Encroachment of river-banks, river-beds and river-channels is yet another important issue that requires to be addressed on an urgent basis.

The previous Congress governments had done an almost irreversible damage to the Brahmaputra by granting land settlement to a large section of immigrants – most of them illegal immigrants – in the numerous char areas. This, in turn, has seriously affected the flow of the river, leading to diversion of the current of the main channel, which in turn is one of the major reasons behind river-bank erosion. The reality is that while a sizeable section of immigrants have gained land in the heart of the Brahmputra because of a wrong policy adopted by the previous Congress governments, majority of the people who have lost their land including homesteads due to erosion belong to various indigenous and tribal communities.

Looking at land degradation, one finds that there is no policy whatsoever in any of the northeastern States that can arrest land degradation and protect the valuable land from becoming unproductive and barren. Plastic, polythene and other non-biodegradable wastes have today made their entry-points and approaches to all towns across the region making them ugly and stinking. The ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’ has been carried out just in name’s sake in most of the States in Northeast; and the huge dumps of municipal waste comprising of plastic, polythene, thermocole and other non-degradable items are proof of this. Guwahati city does not have a sewerage disposal mechanism, while scientific management of municipal waste is practically unheard of. Also keeping in tune with what Prime Minister Modi had said in his speech about India having increased its tree cover by 0.8 million hectares between 2015 and 2017, it is also time to conduct an audit on the Vanamahotsavas that the forest departments of the States observe every year and find out what fraction of sapling planted during such Vanamahotsava actually survive. A few years ago, a citizen in Manipur, on getting a reply to his RTI query, had reportedly discovered that millions of saplings were planted in that State over a period of 20 years or so, but practically none of them grew to become trees. Even if one-fourth of the total saplings had survived and grown, the entire State would have become a dense forest by now.

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