Kolkata :
It’s all right to brag about India evolving as the next super power, but what about its impact on wildlife. For once, why can’t we prioritise GEP (gross environment product) over GDP? Bahar Dutt, author of Green Wars, made the audience sit up and deliberate on the questions during her engaging conversation with British Council director Sujata Sen on Tuesday evening.
At the launch of Dutt’s maiden literary attempt in Kolkata, the Green Oscar recipient, whose environment investigations for a television channel stalled an illegal shopping mall project on the Yamuna river bed, an illegal mine coming up on the Goan forest land and an airport on wetlands that were home to Sarus cranes in Uttar Pradesh, pertinently wondered aloud: Whose development is it, anyway?
“When we say development, it’s this brutal development that we are going through where we need to find out if the development is reaching the people living close to those resources,” said Dutt, giving a presentation on her experience as wildlife conservationist to find out how this conflict between a modernizing economy and saving the planet can be resolved. “That is why I have called my book, ‘Green Wars’,” explained Dutt, after Nayantara Pal Chowdhury, president of the Indo-British Scholars’ Association introduced her to the august gathering at the British Council.
“It doesn’t read like a first book,” said Sen, initiating the dialogue with Dutt. “One just gets hooked on to reading this book. It’s very personal, but for every personal encounter, she takes you to the larger views. It’s so captivating …”
The British Council director made the most intriguing query. What made Dutt write the book? “For a television story, you spend 48 hours trekking through the forests, waiting for the animal that might never show up (supposing it’s a tiger). Then your story comes down to two minutes. So I thought, in the humdrum of television reporting, how to get to the depth of the problem. You could say, ‘Green Wars’ is a back-story to my stories,” Dutt said, recalling: “I can’t say I was involved in the prevention of illegal mining in Goa. But in one of the chapters I have written about the incident where we were physically assaulted by the mining mafia, they tried to snatch our camera.”
Dutt, who had told her television editor in no certain terms that: “I don’t want to do cute-cuddly stories on wildlife, but the politics of it”, would take down notes after every reportage – perhaps to relive those exhilarating moments of her confrontations with gharials and the grand old organg-utan and similar creatures facing an uneasy future in ‘Green Wars’ someday. Moving away from charismatic mega fauna, the book focuses on lesser known species, she has focussed on special like Hoolock gibbons (she helped one find his mate). One of the chapters deals extensively with the ‘Himalayan Tsunami’ in Uttarakhand and why it happened.
For the past one year, she has spent hours in rigorous research to come up with data analysis like India losing 333 acres of forest every day to large development projects like dams, roads and mining. Calling to save all that is precious in a ‘development without brakes’ model of economy, she said, “Indians get rich their lifestyles are getting more and more carbon intensive.”
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Kolkata / by Ajanta Chakraborty, TNN / August 21st, 2014