Blind building laws; dumb law enforcers

The Indian government for the past 63 years have been blind and numb towards the construction of buildings. Without following its own rules the government has been blankly allowing any and every citizen to construct what he or she wants. All is done through few currency notes. This blindness of the government is going to infect the entire population and will paralyze the coming generations.

Gautam Bhatia writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 6 February 2010

Some years ago, a Delhi firm invested in a “smart” building for its new Gurgaon office. A 12-storey structure of beveled glass was designed by a Japanese architect, using American and French technologies and built under South Korean supervision. Surrounded by the dumb buildings of old India, this was supposedly user-friendly intelligent architecture at its best, technology’s answer to India’s future.

When I saw it on a sweltering June afternoon, a few days before its official opening, it stood shimmering silver grey in a black tar parking lot. Near the entrance, a remote sensor detected my approach and — through electronic identification — alerted the control centre inside, of my presence. Within seconds, the door opened. A complicated e-device worth `22 lakh had eliminated a Haryanvi guard at `6,000 per month. Further in, were more smart surprises. My weight on the lift lobby floor triggered six lifts into action; they all came racing down to pick me up. Activated by complicated circuitry that cost `28 lakh, the intelligent building had effectively done away with the need for a push button. Upstairs, the glass-shell of the building was surrounded by Japanese micro louvers and heat sensors at the ridiculously low summer discount rate of `2.8 crore. An elegant, electronically-activated “intelligent” device had happily eliminated the ordinary screen of reed chicks at `12 per square foot. Moreover, the smart structure, built at seven times the rate of a conventional building, had effectively done away with Indian skills and labour — still the cheapest in the world — and joined the ranks of world class architecture. Expensive, over-designed and completely oblivious to local conditions. But smart, nonetheless.

Like the intelligent building, can a smart city in the West be a stupid one in India? The Indian government’s sudden and erratic wish list for smart cities along the Delhi-Mumbai corridor is not only seriously misplaced, but is a harebrained view that cities can be produced on an assembly line, like cars and coke bottles. Certainly, taking Indian urban ideas to the next level should prompt the government to serious measures. But the proposal to build 24 cities when so far not a single new idea on urban living has been implemented is a despairing shot in the dark, a hope that extreme measures will yield results where smaller local initiatives have not even been tried.

Many perplexing questions need to be asked before the government embarks on a reckless real estate adventure. Does the physical structure of the city have any measurable impact on our lives? Can a city’s livability be measured like a gross national product? Can it be rated from one to 100 like an exam score? To say that Shanghai is better than Mumbai is as good as saying that an elm tree is better than neem. It is an entirely facile and inaccurate comparison. Certainly there are measurable barometers that can point to the health of towns; the quality and quantity of municipal services, provision of water, health care and sanitation, the availability of sidewalks, parks and roads, the proliferation of schools, institutes, places of recreation and commerce, all fall within the common understanding of daily human requirement. The nourishment needed to stay alive, like a daily vitamin pill. But at its core, the life breath of a town is a deeply guarded secret. Heard sometimes in sighs of its long time residents, but always hidden from those who seek only its cosmopolitan gratifications — the new French restaurant, the Formula One race track, the mall. Connection to places, links to family, past and present, and to some degree, future opportunity, the city’s physical environment has a direct correlation with personal lives.

In a country which offers a continually degrading form of life to its urban citizens, the importance of new and inventive solutions can hardly be underscored. Choked cities, grey murky rivers, brown skies, depleting energy, erratic services, the haves and the hope-to-haves are ready-to-wage battles over water, electricity, land and air rights. Before the present rage turns to all-out war, city living requires desperate resolution. Unfortunately, the thirst for a new idea in India almost always acts on hyperbolic dimensions: the highest building, the richest Indian, the second-largest dam — reducing public action to meaningless numbers and trivial hyped publicity rather than serious welfare. Somewhere on a foreign trip, a minister or a bureaucrat, sensed the possibility of an idea, and promoted the smart city as a quantum leap of faith.

In a country like China such leaps may be possible. The Chinese willingness to step outside of conventional urban thinking is prompted as much by its own rapid urbanisation, as its need to enlarge the scope of urban technology and experiment with new forms of city living. The new town of Dongtan, near Shanghai, is an altogether unprecedented mix of these lofty ideals. An eco-city of one million residents that promotes a lifestyle without cars, without streets, without conventional houses, is an optimistic sign that China is looking beyond the environmental and technical thresholds set by the West, to set a benchmark for itself. Though Dongtan is a quantum technological leap, its most generous attribute is its affinity to Chinese culture. And the insistence amongst its makers that future lies in promoting a Chinese way of life.

However, an incompetent government with barely a new urban idea to its name is hardly in a position to built 24 new cities from scratch. No one today has even defined in simple common terms a house that suits an Indian lifestyle. No builder has ever attempted — despite massive profits — to create self-sustaining neighborhoods, or clusters of housing that take on fresh ideas. No state or national housing programme has ventured outside the safety of building as anything but a form of fulfilling statistical requirements. A whole city needs to be carefully weighed in cultural terms for the value its residents attach to their lifestyle, and the potential for its growth as a living organism. A thoughtless, culturally unimaginative approach to the design of 24 new towns may yield another 24 Chandigarhs. The sheers numbers of such a disaster would be hard to dismiss as a bureaucratic folly, just another missing file in the ministry. But in 21st century India, so desperate to be counted as a world power, the smart city may just be another thrust to an expensive publicity venture.

Emission Cuts and Copenhagen Talks

All roads lead to Copenhagen this fortnight. World leaders, scientists, journalists, policy makers and stakeholders are converging in the Danish capital to chart out strategies to control climate change. Whether it is going to be an effective summit or another empty talking time is to be watched. From the current diplomatic war over climate change there is less one can read about the genuineness of the world leaders to sort out this complex matter. Every nation and its leader is keen on scoring popularity points rather than finding a long lasting solution to the climate change.

George Manbiot writes in The Times of India on 6 December 2009


Climate change is humankind’s most pressing challenge; unless we can reduce the amount of global warming gases we release into the atmosphere, the heating they cause will melt the world’s glaciers, create both droughts and floods, drive many people from their homes as sea levels rise and threaten the world’s ability to feed itself. So why are so few people trying to stop it?

We have left the task to governments and experts. Public protests demanding action have been small and muted. Because there is so little public engagement, the governments meeting in Copenhagen are proposing only a fraction of the cuts needed to prevent disaster. They bailed out the banks but seem prepared to let the world’s ecosystems collapse. Surely the world’s people should be hammering on their doors, insisting that they act?

I think there are several reasons why this hasn’t happened. The first is a campaign of disinformation by the fossil fuel companies, whose investments will lose value if a strong climate deal is struck. For 20 years the energy industries have sponsored “experts” to tell the public that climate change either isn’t happening or is no big deal. Some corporations have paid astroturf groups — fake grassroots campaigns — to lobby against action on climate change. They have successfully sown doubt and confusion in people’s minds.

Another reason is that the most common human response to any crisis is denial. Denial is a survival strategy: if we really came to terms with our own mortality, or with the evils of the world, we wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. The firmer the evidence of climate change has become, the more people have gone into denial; now in some countries nearly half the population insists that global warming is just a scare story, even though you can see the early impacts almost everywhere.

But perhaps the most important reason is that the issue — and the terms used to describe it — are so complex and buried in jargon that many people simply switch off before they’ve understood its importance. When someone tells you that “unless we reduce Kyoto basket greenhouse gas emissions to maintain atmospheric concentrations below 450 parts per million carbon dioxide equivalent, anthropogenic warming will initiate biospheric feedbacks”, you could be forgiven for staring at them blankly. That sentence describes a critically important global issue. But it’s hardly a catchy slogan, is it?

Both the science and the policies needed to deal with manmade climate change are inherently complex. As soon as you get beyond the simple story — that the planet is warming up because we’re burning fossil fuels and destroying natural carbon stores — you start to get bogged down in mind-numbing detail. The fact that some scientists seem to be incapable of speaking any human language doesn’t help, but even when they do talk clearly it’s often hard to grasp.

I believe there is a real democratic problem here, that is not confined to climate change. As we know ever more about the world, as experts become ever more specialized and governments rely ever more heavily on experts, it becomes harder for ordinary citizens to engage with the issues that affect their lives. In Shakespeare’s day, one person could attain the entire sum of human knowledge. You probably could have got it onto a couple of CDs. Today even the specialists can’t keep up with their own field of knowledge.

Arthur C Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. He might have added that any sufficiently advanced expertise is indistinguishable from gobbledegook. We are shut out, by sheer complexity, from the important issues that affect our lives and so can play an ever less meaningful role in their resolution. This allows governments and other powerful players to hide behind jargon. As issues become more complex it becomes easier to bamboozle us.

What can be done about it? I believe that all experts whose work might have an impact on public policy have a duty to speak and write as clearly as possible. I believe that governments have a duty to keep their citizens informed as well as they can, spelling out complex issues in terms that most people can grasp. I believe the media has a special responsibility for investigating and explaining complex stories as objectively as possible.

But not everyone who informs us has our best interests at heart. Where climate change is concerned, some of those who communicate most clearly — the PR companies hired by fossil fuel companies — seek to mislead us. Citizens also have a duty: to be as well-informed as possible, so that they can make sensible democratic choices. But we have to accept that this will become ever more difficult as life becomes more complex.

George Monbiot is the UK-based author of the bestselling books, ‘Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning’ and ‘ The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order’

Dilly-Dallying Indian Emission Curbs

Will he or won't he? This prolonged confusion regarding India's position on emission curbs continue without an end. In the latest switch over in position the environment minister says in a letter to P.M (Crazy to be leaked to the media) that India should agree to the developed world's insistence to cut emission curbs. While taking this cut demand India can reap dividends like compensation from the developed to the tune of 70 billion euros and its push to the UN security council. These matters need secret pursuit rather than communicating through the media. Although the minister seems to be shocked over the media leakage of his "privileged letter to the P.M", this is how the agents get the insider information. India don't need enemy spies. It is time to kill these kinds of silly acts and take a stable position on the climate change.

The Times of India writes (19 October 2009)

India seems to have begun to shuffle its feet in the climate change negotiations. Environment minister Jairam Ramesh, in a confidential letter to the PM, has suggested that India junk the Kyoto Protocol, delink itself from G77 -- the 131-member bloc of developing nations -- and take on greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments under a new deal without any counter guarantee of finances and technology.

This proposal comes just after he wrote to the PM suggesting India permit strict external scrutiny -- just as is done under IMF and WTO -- of the mitigation measures it takes at its own cost.

If accepted by the government, the minister's proposal will radically shift India's stand away from its position on climate negotiations that governments of all political hues have backed since 1990 and which was defended robustly as recently as at the UN talks in Bangkok earlier this month.

The minister has justified the proposed shift of gears by repeating his argument that India need not be seen as a deal-breaker and should try to curb emissions in its own interest. He has also pointed to the advantages -- a permanent seat on the Security Council, for instance -- that it can hope to reap with a changed stance.

In his October 13 letter to the PM, Ramesh argues for a deviation from the Kyoto Protocol under which only the developed countries -- listed in Annexure 1 -- are required to take obligations for emission cuts, saying that it would also help in a better alignment with the US. "We must welcome initiatives to bring the US into the mainstream, if need be through a special mechanism, without diluting basic Annex 1/non-Annex distinctions. If the Australian Proposal of a schedule maintains this basic distinction and nature of differential obligations we should have no great theological objections."

When approached for his comments, the union minister responded on phone, "I am surprised that a privileged communication between me and the Prime Minister has found its way into the public domain. I am shocked. And whatever I had to say I have said to the PM." He refused to speak further.

In his letter, Ramesh emphasizes his concern about India being seen as a bugbear for the developed countries in the climate negotiations. "India must listen more and speak less in negotiations" as its stance is "disfavoured by the developed countries, small island states and vulnerable countries. It takes away from India's aspirations for permanent membership of the Security Council."

The minister has also suggested diluting India's strong stance -- enshrined in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Convention (UNFCCC) -- on demanding compensation from the industrialized countries in terms of funds and technology for having caused the climate change problem to begin with. He writes, "The position we take on international mitigation commitments only if supported by finance and technology needs to be nuanced simply because we need to mitigate in self-interest."

Ramesh had previously suggested to the PM in a personal letter that India allow IMF and WTO-style review and `surveillance' of even those emission control steps that it takes under its own legislation and at its cost.

Besides their radical import, his proposals are significant because they come just a week after India vigorously stuck to its known negotiating guns at the Bangkok round of negotiations. The UN talks in the Thai capital saw India leading the attack by G77 and China on the Australian Proposal which the environment minister now favours in his letter to the PM.

India along with other countries said that the industrialised countries by introducing the US and EU-backed Australian Proposal were attempting to "kill" the Kyoto Protocol, and alter the character of the UN Framework Convention. The Indian delegates said that the Australian Proposal, asking for a single legal instrument, would "unilaterally impose new commitments and burdens on developing countries and undermine the exiting convention".

But now Ramesh has said India should "not stick with G77 but be embedded in G20. We should be pragmatic and constructive, not argumentative and polemical." Interestingly, India had recently fought off immense pressure at the G20 talks to dilute its stand and give up its rights to financial compensation.

An internal document of the government cleared by the environment minister, drawing the "red lines" for the Bangkok negotiations clearly states that India will not allow commitments of the rich countries to be listed in a single instrument along with the `actions' that India undertakes. In short, it said that the emission-cut obligations of the rich countries under the Kyoto Protocol should not be lumped with whatever the developing countries agree to do voluntarily -- something that the Australian Proposal seeks to do away with.

The brief for Bangkok, which is with TOI, had said that the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol along with deep and ambitious cuts of the rich nations is of critical importance and non-negotiable. It also told the negotiators -- again contrary to what Ramesh suggests to the PM -- that they shall not agree to any international review of its unilateral and unsupported domestic action under any agreement.

The UN Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol distinguishes between the industrialized countries that are historically to blame for the accumulated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The Protocol, to which most countries, with the exception of US, are party, imposes strong emission reduction targets, obligations and non-compliance penalties on only the rich nations. It also follows the "polluters pay" principle where developing countries like India have no obligation to cut down emissions and must be compensated fully for any actions it might undertake voluntarily to reduce emissions.

The Australian Proposal runs contrary to the existing Kyoto Protocol and has been strongly backed by the US. Even EU has come around to back it. It demands that all the countries, including India, be put on merely one list and that all countries, with the exception of the least developed, take on commitments of same nature though of various degrees without any contingent guarantee of technology or finance in return.

In fact, another proposal backed by US demands that India instead contribute money to climate change actions for the rest of the world. The EU does not go that far, but has said that India should reduce its emissions substantially below `business as usual' at mostly its own cost.

In his letter to the PM, the environment minister has said India will suffer no harm if the Australian Proposal does not dilute the distinction between Annex 1 countries and others, and recognises difference in obligations. Significantly, the Australian Proposal has no such provisions.

The proposal, which the US has lobbied India in bilateral forums and in multilateral meets to accept, asks all countries regardless of existing status, to take obligations. In its present form, when read with other proposals, it seeks to cap India's emissions by 2020 and force further reductions later on. A cap on emissions automatically converts into a cap of how much energy India can use.

The US has demanded that each country undertake a domestic legislation -- something that Ramesh too has now backed -- and put that as part of its obligations under the Australian Proposal. The US is keen to do so as it is not a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol and does not want to adhere to a strict multilateral regime that imposes clear penalties and targets to be achieved. It's been demanding that India, China, South Africa and Brazil also take on similar obligations before it joins any new international compact.

In Bangkok, the consternation of the Indian negotiators, the chief US negotiator had openly demanded the delegation relent from its stance, as the Indian environment minister had shown more flexibility in meetings during his US tour.

Observers feel that Indian environment minister's proposals would sit well with the US position despite the difference in energy consumption levels of the two countries.

India, at present emits only 1.2 tonnes per capita of greenhouse gas emissions, as compared to 20 tonnes by the US. Acquiescence in any regime that does not differentiate between the super polluters like the US, on the one hand, and varying levels of developing countries on the other, would, lock the country into an arrangement where its growth options would be restricted.

The suggestion by the minister comes contrary to the internal position that the government had taken as recently as July while assessing how badly uncompensated mitigation would impact India's economy.

In a note circulated within the government and to select Members of Parliament, it had said that mitigation action (as the Australia Proposal suggests) would lead to rise in the price of power and a drop in the production, impact the expansion of railways and adversely hit the prices of fertilizers in years to come. It would increase the cost of all goods, especially food items; the government assessed that it would increase unemployment especially in the rural agricultural sector. It had also warned that even if the country were to undertake such actions, it would have no impact on the costs of climate change adaptation that India would have to bear.

Interestingly, Ramesh's concern about India being seen as the leader of G77 comes when India is hosting a meeting of different countries on October 22-23 to build consensus among the countries on what demands should be made at the UN negotiations on technology. On October 21, India is also holding a dialogue with China and signing an MoU on climate change.

The PM is also slated to visit the US next month where climate change is expected to be a key issue for discussion. The minister in his letter has suggested that just like he has signed MoUs with other countries, "India should sign an agreement on climate change cooperation (during the PM's visit to US) and show willingness to engage."

Be serious about the climate change

The advanced world is non serious about the climate change. This evident from its disinterest in reducing the emission levels in its own back yards and funding the developing countries to switch over to clean technologies. With the inter-dependence of the globe at the highest level it is difficult to ignore these two factors.

The Times of India writes (26 September 2009)

India has demonstrated that it takes the climate change issue seriously: the national action plan on climate change has spelt out the details of
implementation of eight missions and is to soon establish a climate change mitigation authority that will set targets to reduce emissions by 2020. India has a ministry dedicated to promotion of alternative energy and several projects are underway to promote adaptation measures. Far more could be achieved if developed countries deliver the promised financial and technological assistance.

At the New York G20 climate summit convened by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, there was no discussion by developed economies about providing financial assistance to developing countries or transfer of clean technology. The occasion was used to make speeches that were long on promises and short on specifics. US president Barack Obama promised to contribute to a road map to protect the planet's future. But he gave no details. Scientists recommend that an 80 per cent cut in emissions by the developed countries by 2050 is vital to avert the tipping point in climate change. The long-term goalpost might be unachievable under current circumstances but it provides a benchmark to work with. Meanwhile, improved technology might one day make the target achievable.
Together, the US and China account for 40 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions; hence the need for more concerted action. But Obama's climate change legislation for energy reform is unlikely to be cleared by the Senate before the December Copenhagen summit of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change where members hope to come to an emissions reduction agreement that will replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol due to end in 2012. Senators are currently more concerned about health-care reform, financial stability and the size of troops in Afghanistan than environmental issues. The proposed US legislation, however, is not developing world-friendly as it penalises it in terms of trading rights.

Chinese president Hu Jintao has assured the G20 that China will improve its energy efficiency and curb the rise of CO2 emissions "per unit of gross domestic product by a notable margin by 2020 from the 2005 level" but he failed to elaborate how China would achieve this and by how much emissions would be cut. Similarly, although Obama made promises of "a new era of renewable energy promotion and carbon emissions cuts", he did not elaborate if there is a plan in place. That the US and China are presenting a positive and united approach without a specific action plan could mean that the Copenhagen summit will achieve little more than getting the representatives of 192 member countries to visit Denmark at the further expense of the planet. Be

Safeguarding Water Resources

Water is precious natural resources. Polluting this valuable resource or commercializing it will backfire the entire society.

The amount of water being used in India from underground sources is estimated to be 45 per cent more that what natural systems or artificial
recharging can replenish. It's scary, and not very dissimilar from what we face on the energy front. Except that while alternatives to fossil fuels are on the horizon, there's no alternative to water. The only solution, therefore, is to utilise underground water resources more efficiently.

As detailed in a report in this newspaper on August 21, there is a discrepancy between what scientific findings by independent sources say about the current stock of groundwater in the country and what official sources proclaim. Scientific surveys show, for example, that underground water in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan is disappearing at the rate of one foot per year. Another media investigation has revealed that while the UP government claims that more than 80 per cent of agricultural land is under irrigation, farmers say it is barely 25 per cent.

Water insecurity has come about because of poor hydrological management - water storage, distribution, usage and conservation - as well as failure of water authorities to periodically survey and record accurately the state of the country's water table, the extent of its usage and wastage. Agriculture is the chief consumer of water. Therefore it's imperative to ensure scientific delivery and usage of water for irrigation, besides encouraging drought-resistant seeds and changing cropping patterns where necessary.

Drip irrigation - where water is delivered in measured doses through slender pipes close to the plant, thereby avoiding wastage from spillovers and evaporation - is being used successfully in countries like Israel where water is scarce. Collaborative efforts in this area between the two countries ought to be explored further so that more farmers can benefit from the new technology. Growing water-intensive crops like sugarcane and rice ought to be confined to areas where the crops are grown traditionally because of water availability. Cost of electricity supplied for agricultural purposes - primarily to pump water - needs to be recovered from the consumer. A scarce commodity can no longer be given away free.

India depends on groundwater reserves for most of its agricultural and domestic water requirements - hence the stress on groundwater reservoirs. Urban and rural rainwater harvesting is an option that has not been explored fully. Check dams can be thought of as an alternative to mega dam projects to provide local water support. Above all, the problem needs to be acknowledged first by government agencies and ministries before solutions can be found.

Dangerous Use of Plastics

Convenience and cost effectiveness of plastic bags are driving the society to the dangerous periphery. Despite hectic publicity against the use of plastic bags for common purposes there is decline of its use. All stakeholders should join with the government to stop the over use of plastic bags in every day lives.

The Times of India writes (16 July 2009)

Plastic is convenient. It is cheap, too. So plastic bags are ubiquitous in cities, towns and hill stations. From mega grocery store chains and retail outlets to pushcart vendors, eateries and restaurants, the plastic bag is the wonder solution to storage and cartage. Sadly it also kills hundreds of thousands of birds, whales, seals and turtles every year the world over. In India, discarded plastic bags choke not only drains leading to flooding in cities but cows, too. The animals eat leftover food-filled bags discarded on the roads, and suffer the consequences. Polythene bags are not biodegradable. In landfills, they leach toxic chemicals into the soil, contaminating groundwater. Polythene bags that are of less than 40-micron thickness are more harmful not only to the environment; as popular wraps for takeaway foods, they impact public health as well.

The issue at hand is to work out how we can reduce the risks with better usage and disposal methods as well as eventually replace plastic with safer options. A complete ban might not be the answer. Recycling is an option, and this could apply not only to recycling better quality plastic bags but also waste paper. The advantage of allowing bags that are more than 40 microns thick is that they have some economic value, and thus provide some incentive for recycling. Another option would be a plastic tax, which would lead to greater reuse of plastic as well as a shift towards more ecologically friendly packaging.

Reuse, reduce and recycle the three R's of polythene use may be a popular mantra among schoolchildren, but we don't take it seriously enough as adults. The throwaway culture is a major reason for increase in toxic garbage and sewage clogging. There are many alternatives to polythene bags. Encourage the use of jute bags and baskets that were used by shoppers before plastics. Use bags made of recycled paper, or else shopping trolleys and rucksacks or backpacks.

Bangladesh banned thin polythene bags in 2002 to solve the problem of blocked drains and flooding and it has worked. Delhi began with a ban early this year but the momentum seems to be petering out. Biodegradable polythene made of starch is another, less affordable option. A total ban on thin polythene bags coupled with practising the three R's will help us take significant steps towards curbing the plastic menace.

Deceived Monsoon

No monsoon so far is a bad news for all. The urbanites reeling under horrible heat and the rural farmers worried about the kharif crops, it is really bad time for all in India.

The Times of India says (25 June 2009)

The monsoon is part of India's problems this year instead of being a solution to its economic woes. The weatherman on Wednesday lowered Farmers open a sack of fertilizers on a dry piece of land on the outskirts of Amritsar.(AP Photo)
More Pictures
the prediction for the 2009 monsoon, saying that India would get only 93% of the normal rainfall of 89 cm during these months.

More worryingly, the Met department predicted that the grain bank of the country - north-west India, including Punjab and Haryana - would suffer the most, getting only 81% of the long-term average for the region.

Considering that the regional prediction levels have an error level of 8%, rain in north-west India could be as low as 73% of the normal amount, leading to a major drought in the region.

This is a significant "correction" from the IMD's mid-April statement predicting "near normal" 96% rainfall in the country.

Holding a press conference on Wednesday, earth sciences minister Prithviraj Chavan accepted that the situation was worrisome but claimed that the worst was over and July and August would see the monsoon picking up in many parts of the country. Up to June 24, the country had received only 53% of the normal rain, with central India being the worst sufferer, getting only 25% of its normal quota.

While the government shied away from declaring an emergency of any kind, the minister said the cabinet secretary was keeping daily tabs on the situation and other ministries would react to the situation as it developed.

Such low levels of a predicted monsoon were last seen in 2004 when the country suffered a serious drought and the IMD had missed the signals early enough to put out a warning.

IMD officials admitted that the chances of this being an El Nino year were as high as 60%. El Nino is a weather condition in the Pacific Ocean that leads to lower monsoon rains in India. D S Pai, director of the National Climate Centre of the IMD said that 29 of the 36 El Nino years between 1875 and 2008 had seen less than normal rain. Of these, in as many as 15 years there was more than a 10% deficit in rainfall.

Pai said El Nino could pick up in July and the lowering of the monsoon estimation showed its initial impact. But it would have to be monitored in order to gauge how badly it would hit the monsoons in the coming months. Scientists suggested that the timing of when the EL Nino effect matures would decide the fate of the monsoon.

If the weather anomaly develops early, and in the central Pacific, the chances of a bad monsoon would be very high, they said. Scientists will be closely looking out for signs of this happening in the days to come. Pai also pointed out that the cyclonic storm earlier in May had stolen the thunder from the monsoon in June. While the minister was at pains to defend the figures, saying they were what science was able to predict at the moment, the regional figures released as scheduled on Wednesday increased concerns that some pockets of India may suffer a near-drought situation even if other pockets get rains.

Rumour or reality: Global warming

Global warming is a rumor or reality? One has go into the details.

Bjorn Lomborg writes in The Economic Times 17 June 2009)

The continuous presentation of scary stories about global warming in the popular media makes us unnecessarily frightened. Even worse, it
terrifies our kids.

Al Gore famously depicted how a sea-level rise of 20 feet (six metres) would almost completely flood Florida, New York, Holland, Bangladesh and Shanghai, even though the UN estimates that sea levels will rise 20 times less than that, and do no such thing. When confronted with these exaggerations, some of us say that they are for a good cause, and surely there is no harm done if the result is that we focus even more on tackling climate change. A similar argument was used when George W Bush's administration overstated the terror threat from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

But this argument is astonishingly wrong. Such exaggerations do plenty of harm. Worrying excessively about global warming means that we worry less about other things. We focus, for example, on global warming's impact on malaria instead of tackling the half-billion people suffering from malaria today with prevention and treatment policies that are much cheaper and dramatically more effective than carbon reduction would be.

Exaggeration also wears out the public's willingness to tackle global warming. If the planet is doomed, people wonder, why do anything? A record 54% of US voters now believe the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is. A majority of people now believes - incorrectly - that global warming is not even caused by humans. In the UK, 40% believe that global warming is exaggerated and 60% doubt that it is man-made.

But the worst cost of exaggeration is the unnecessary alarm that it causes - particularly among children. Recently, I discussed climate change with a group of Danish teenagers. One of them worried that global warming would cause the planet to "explode" - and all the others had similar fears.

In the US, the ABC television network recently reported that psychologists are starting to see more neuroses in people anxious about climate change. An article in The Washington Post cited nine-year-old Alyssa, who cries about the possibility of mass animal extinctions from global warming. In her words: "I don't like global warming because it kills animals, and I like animals." From a child who is yet to lose all her baby teeth: "I worry about [global warming] because I don't want to die."

The newspaper also reported that parents are searching for "productive" outlets for their eight-year-olds' obsessions with dying polar bears. They might be better off educating them and letting them know that, contrary to common belief, the global polar bear population has doubled and perhaps even quadrupled over the past half-century, to about 22,000. Despite diminishing - and eventually disappearing - summer Arctic ice, polar bears will not become extinct. After all, in the first part of the current interglacial period, glaciers were almost entirely absent in the northern hemisphere, and the Arctic was probably ice-free for 1,000 years, yet polar bears are still with us.


Another nine-year old showed The Washington Post his drawing of a global warming timeline. "That's the Earth now," Alex says, pointing to a dark shape at the bottom. "And then it's just starting to fade away." Looking up to make sure his mother is following along, he taps the end of the drawing: "In 20 years, there's no oxygen." Then, to dramatise the point, he collapses, "dead," to the floor.

And these are not just two freak stories. In a new survey of 500 US pre-teens, it was found that one in three children aged 6-11 feared the earth would not exist when they reach adulthood because of environmental threats. An unbelievable one-third of our children believe that they don't have a future because of scary global warming stories. We see the same pattern in the UK, where a survey showed that half of children aged 7-11 are anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep. This is grotesquely harmful.

And let us be honest. This scare was intended. Children believe that global warming will destroy the planet before they grow up because adults are telling them that. When every prediction about global warming is scarier than the last one, and the scariest predictions - often not backed up by peer-reviewed science - get the most airtime, it is little wonder that children are worried.

Nowhere is this deliberate fear mongering more obvious than in Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, a film marketed as "by far the most terrifying film you will ever see." Take a look at the trailer for this movie on YouTube. Notice the imagery of chilling, larger-than-life forces evaporating our future. The commentary tells us that this film has "shocked audiences everywhere," and that "nothing is scarier" than what Gore is about to tell us. Notice how the trailer even includes a nuclear explosion.

The current debate about global warming is clearly harmful. It is time we demanded that the media stop scaring us and our kids silly. We deserve a more reasoned, more constructive, and less frightening dialogue.