Earth Day 2006
Royal Bengal Tigers apart, Nepal and Bangladesh threatened by Indonesian venture
Sankar Ray
Published on April 21, 2006
To
The Moderators,
April 22 is also the 127th birthday of V I Lenin, although both the USSR and China paid no heed to ecological imperatives.
You gave only a day's time to submit a piece. Instead, I offer a newsy (not without analytical sidelights) for your consideration.
Warm regards,
Sankar Ray
Royal Bengal Tigers apart, Nepal and Bangladesh threatened by Indonesian venture
The cluster of projects that the US $ one billion Salim group of Indonesia proposes to set up in the West Bengal part of Sunderban Delta will cause a multi-nation ecological disaster, leave alone the famed Royal Bengal Tigers in the delta covering eastern India and Bangladesh.
Two well-known Indian geoscientists who served the Geological Survey of India in senior positions for several decades, Subrata Sinha, formerly deputy director-general of GSI and ex- director, Centre for Earth Science Studies, Kerala, and Devashis Chatterjee, ex-senior DDG of GSI and a former senior fellow, environmental studies, Netaji Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata envision what they describe as an environmental threat “ with chain effects”. Speaking to this writer, Sinha categorically stated, “aside from damaging the entire deltaic wetland system of eastern India and Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan too will be under threat if any portion of this dynamic natural equilibrium is intercepted by any mega-development project. His apprehensions are strongly endorsed by Magsaysay laureate environmental activist Medha Patkar who fears that it might trigger a ‘negative development’.
Anthony Salim , the supremo of US $ one billion Salim group signed a memorandum of understanding with the West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in Jakarta in September last year for setting up three projects in the Indian segment of Sunderbans over a period of five years: a township, a health city and an IT park. The communist government agreed to lease out a 5100 acre compact strip of land for those projects.
Interestingly, Bhattacharjee, a polit bureau member of India’s largest Leftist party, and his party leaders are mum about the murky antecedents of Salim group, alleges Kartik Pal, polit bureau member of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)-Liberation group, the lone Maoist party participating in the parliamentary system in India. “The Salim group had flourished during the three decades of Suharto regime when thousands of Indonesian communists and fellow-travelers were butchered in collusion with the CIA”, Pal told this correspondent.
However, Sinha refuses to politicize the issue, “ I have no allergy towards Anthony Salim but am opposed to mega-development venture in the region, whoever does it. The fall-out of aggravated erosion and siltation will mean an unprecedented ecological disequilibrium which won’t spare upper watershed countries like Nepal and Bhutan too.”
Driving his point geologically, Sinha explained that the flow and lift water resources comprise “a single geohydrological continuum”, in and around Sunderbans, the world’s largest delta. It should be left untouched as a large portion of it has already been encroached , followed by disorderly human settlements and activities. The dynamics of the eco-system is changed for the worse. Any large project is simply a bigger assault to the deltaic outlet of the subcontinental watershed that includes the Himalayas and the alluvial basin formed by the complex Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna–Hugli river system right down to the estuaries of the Bay of Bengal”.
Chatterjee, focusing more on the fundamental geology across the natural flow, pointed out that “rivers are not accidental features but are formations in response to natural processes like rainfall and gravity. In the lower reaches, where the land itself is made up of sediment deposited by the rivers, the pattern is clear with a normal flow such as a flood plain on each side, onto which the peak flow extends”. While the post-flood land mass is alluvial , formed by the receding water, the flood plain including the river banks is high on either side. Across the levees lie backswamps or shallow depressions sloping away from the river. The flood plain ends against higher ground - usually older terraces or valley walls. Sunderbans is a large monsoon delta. The land over a wide area is made up of a mosaic of such shallow swampy depressions separated by streams and creeks where the tides have free play”, he stated.
He is especially worried about the multi-lane expressway -another Salim proposal- right down to Kulpi-Baruipur, one of the most fertile regions of eastern India , closer to the Bay of Bengal. “This road will cut directly across the path of all the remaining streams and creeks that make up the water component of the Sundarbans and the encroachment on the famous east Kolkata wetlands has eaten up the fringes. The areas, once highly productive sources of fish and vegetables are now concrete jungles making life difficult there. The wetlands fail to absorb the rain water drained from the city now. The result is more water logging and choking in its own filth”.
Resentment has been brewing among the second-line of leadership hierarchy of CPI(M). Land reform minister Abdur Rezzak Mollah, elected to the state legislature from the Sunderbans, expressed his reservations about the venture. “ Change of land utilization-pattern will affect the peasants in general”, he told a group of journalists a month after the MoU was signed in Jakarta.
