‘We should start weeping for Goa, just as we wept for Wayanad…India’s climate disasters are man-made’

Amitav Ghosh is an author, climate commentator and winner of the Erasmus Prize 2024 for his contribution to the theme “imagining the unthinkable” through his work on climate crisis and human interactions. As heavy rains threaten havoc in Goa, he tells Bappa Majumdar what India should do to cope with the challenges of climate crisis and other threats to environment:

● What are the lessons from the landslides in Wayanad? First, there are going to be more and more disasters of this kind across India, not only because of the accelerating impacts of climate change but also because of other kinds of anthropogenic impacts like road building, deforestation, rock and sand quarrying and faulty patterns of construction. It’s certainly true that mountain regions are especially vulnerable because of the threat of landslides, Glacial Outburst floods and so on. But we should remember that at the same time as the Wayanad landslides, there was massive flooding also in cities like New Delhi and Lucknow. In New Delhi three students died because they were trapped in a basement. Even the political centre of the nation, the new Parliament building, was flooded and this happened not only because of an exceptional weather event but also because the building itself was badly designed and hastily constructed. This is really a metaphor for what’s unfolding around the country.

● Do other cities and regions like Goa face similar threats? The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, led by the great ecologist Madhav Gadgil, produced a report in 2011 that warned of the dangers Wayanad and the region would face if house building, road construction and settlement activities continued at the same pace. But the commission’s recommendations were ignored. And yet we refuse to learn. I watched a short video by the environmentalist Claude Alvarez in which he says it is time for the world to know that the current BJP govt in Goa is converting massive areas of previously protected hill slopes into development areas. This means that Goa too will soon have to deal with disastrous landslides. He says: “We should weep for Wayanad, but we should also start weeping for Goa.” Goa is witnessing extreme rains again.

● India lacks a nodal department to work on forecasting floods and landslides. Forecasting can obviously play a very important part in mitigating the effects of floods and landslides. But unfortunately, the present govt is proceeding in the wrong direction. So, for example, at the urging of NITI Aayog, 199 district agro-meteorological units were shut down in March 2024. These units had for many years provided free advisories to millions of farmers across the country. The intention, according to this report, is that these services should be privatised. So what we have here is a neo-liberal double whammy – allowing the construction industry to run rampant on the one hand, and on the other, shutting down governmental advisory services in favour of corporate profits. However, I would add here that we should not imagine that improved forecasting will be able to provide a magical fix to these problems. These are man-made disasters created by corruption and malfunctioning systems of governance.

● Is a centralised approach to tackle climate change a good idea? The paradox of climate change is that it’s a global phenomenon whose effects are always manifested locally. So forecasters may be able to tell us, for instance, that such and such city is going to be hit by a rain bomb at such and such time. But only people who know that city very intimately at a local level will be able to tell us which neighbourhoods will be worst affected. Often the people who have this kind of knowledge are those who are most likely to be ignored.

● Ecologically sensitive hill stations are teeming with tourists. Should there be some restrictions? Yes, absolutely. In the long run hill stations and mountain regions will need to impose restrictions on tourism. They could perhaps impose ticketing systems of some kind, or lotteries. Bhutan has been an outlier in this regard. However, let us not forget that the central govt has itself been pushing to increase travel in some of the most ecologically sensitive regions, by proposing four-lane roads for the Char Dham. These projects will bring ruin upon the people who live in those areas.

● The presence of microplastics in Bay of Bengal points to a marine disaster. We should not be surprised by the discovery of microplastics in Bay of Bengal. Microplastics are everywhere now, including the poles and in the high Himalayas, and they are already having catastrophic effects on human health. Microplastics often contain phthalates, a class of chemical compounds that are also known as plasticizers because they are used to make plastics more flexible and durable – they are now found everywhere in the food chain. Some scientists believe that phthalates are linked to the steep decline in male fertility that has been observed around the world in recent years. As to what microplastics are doing to marine animals and birds, the research makes one weep.

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Views expressed above are the author’s own.

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