Nobel cause

text of the letter sent to the press:

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the Nobel Laureate, IPCC, when asked to comment on the TATA '1- lakh car' project, in the context of the adverse remarks made by the famed economist, Thomas Friedman, expressed his wish that TATA's would simultaneously get into public bus transport services. And, TATA's being TATA's would be happy to do so, provided the government facilitated their entry. Also, so would the house of TVS, who anyway started off as public bus service providers in the city of Madurai, but had to give it up because of nationalisation during emergency. The liberalisation thereafter has been token at best, leading to a situation where the organised sector would rather keep away totally, leaving it all in the hands of the 'blue-line' kind of operators, apart from the only slightly better government agencies, with disastrous consequences.

The sad irony however is that whereas it is in vital infrastructure sectors such as public bus transport services that the country so desperately needs the efficiencies of the organised sector players like TATA's and TVS's, in order to contain the ever increasing damage to the environment apart from the cluttering of the cities, they have willy-nilly landed up doing exactly the opposite, by producing more and more cars and motor-bikes.

The Nobel prize bestows a responsibility upon Dr Pachauri to correct this anomaly.

development and greenery can co-exist

Posting made in the local RWA yahoo-group in response to a mail denouncing protests against indiscriminate road-widening:

I am a member of the tree-lover group "Hasiru Usiru", the term literally meaning 'green alone is life'. While admittedly there are a number of youngsters in the group who are idealistic and hold extreme views, I have been trying to lend a voice of moderation to the on-going debates amongst them.

In fact, even as the 80 ft road was being widened, I had myself interacted with the BMP officials to identify a number of trees which needed to be removed (though, some of them still remain, for reasons not too clear) even while trying to prevent removal and chopping of trees in the indiscriminate fashion that the contractor was going about.

Development and greenery can co-exist, atleast to a great extent, is what I would like to believe.

In that respect, I totally agree with Maj Kapur when he says that there's no point widening a road at one end when you have no clue as to how to tackle the problem at the other end of the very same road. Also, years after widening, you can't bother to have the electric poles shifted out to the edges. Even in the case of the majestic Banyan tree that once stood at the Aishwarya junction, over the chopping of which Zafar Futehally (the famed naturalist in whose exalted company we Koramangalites are fortunate to live) shed quite a few tears, the entire stump remained in place for over two years, making a total mockery of the stated purpose of road widening.

As such, we need to say no to the 'bits & pieces' efforts of the BMP lot so that they are forced to come up with more comprehensive solutions, if not for the city as a whole, atleast for the same stretch of road.

Ultimately, again, as I have been repeatedly stating, the solution lies not just in widening roads, but in bringing about a check in the usage of personalised forms of transport. For this, people have to learn to start using public transport services, and the government has to facilitate that.