Green insights

Sometimes it is difficult to explain some cruel ironies of life.

Late last evening an oldtimer, serious journalist called me out of the blue, to ask if I knew of the demise of HSK. This morning's papers had a terse set of 3 paras on Prof H S Krishnaswamy's death. He was an economist, writer, journalist, among other things. He was part of another generation. A person who couldn't suffer stupidity; a 'Nehruvian Indian' who knew less of his own interest, as of the larger interest of the world and his country.

BCIL signed on Tuesday the CII Code for Sustainability as part of a roadshow organised by CII and the India Green Business Council. BCIL is one of 150 such signatories in the Indian corporate sector who have been invited to make this commitment to Ten Commandments for reducing natural resource use.

P Chidambaram recently released a compilation of his writings of the last few years on many facets of India. He writes and reflects, among many things, upon his vision of a new India which will move into becoming environmentally sustainable. While he speaks with firmness and clarity on many issues ranging from finance to politics, there are some contours he foresees that will be deeply disturbing to any thinking professional or kisan.

The future of construction is already upon us with the spectre of shortages forcing new inventions, says Chandrashekar Hariharan

They were waiting for long, and like good professionals biding their time. With the blowing of the lid on oil price, a major event went past us nearly unnoticed. Mid-July, the Bush government lifted a 17-year-long ban on offshore drilling. The hope is that more production will ease the spiraling fuel price crisis.

There was a quiet milestone that India reached a couple of months’ ago when the country’s GDP crossed the one trillion dollar mark for the first time in all history. It was more a financial juggle that got us to the number - with rupee depreciating to the 41–level against the US dollar.
This puts us in the company of eleven other countries in the world. Is this a ‘dirty dozen’?

‘The world goes to town’ was a headline that one editor wrily wrote out for a report in May on the world, for the first time ever having its urban folk outnumbering their country-cousins.

If 1800 and the steam engine stirred the first signs of what we call the City today, this significant watershed we saw in May this year is not one that will be forgotten easily. That’s a major tilting of numbers in the world, but sadly went nearly unnoticed.

While we thank the few who have struggled to make for a world of buildings, products and lifestyles that are 'eco-friendly', a friend I met recently wondered aloud, how we got to becoming as eco-hostile as the world has.

Some of us will remember a banner headline in major dailies a few months ago. One of them carried an eight-column banner on the possible Gangotri glacier meltdown and the threat to the entire Gangetic Plain. Pushing the panic button on such potential eco-disasters is not a bad idea--at least it will stir us into action!

Early August this year, newspapers quoted Nature Geoscience confirming what the scientific world has known for about 20 years: the Earth is a sensitive being and can very quickly, without notice, slip into another Ice Age.

If 1800 and the steam engine stirred the first signs of what we call the City today, we saw a significant watershed on May 23 this year. Newspapers reported, quietly, a statistic that is already forgotten in the debris of news we read every day: that week of May 2008 saw a major tilting of numbers in the world: the world's urban population, for the first time ever in all of time, outnumbered the rural population.