My City My Responsibility - Need Clean, Green Rivers and much more!!!!

 Dear Friends, 

Selfie with fellow concerned citizens!

Being part of the Pune River Revival (PRR) movement has been a challenging journey. Everyday a group of concerned citizens and members of Jeevitnadi, the organisation which is spearheading this movement are striving harder from all the spheres just to ensure that the so-called 'rejuvenation' plan on our RIVERFRONT proposed by the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) be SCRAPPED and the ecological ALTERNATIVE suggested by Jeevitnadi team be adopted! 

Mature tree marked to be cut

Every now and then there's a walk on the stretches where the rampant devastating work has been initiated. I visited the stretch at the Bund Garden where I witnessed illegitimate cutting of almost 700-1000 trees in a stretch of less than 500 m. You can imagine how dense is the vegetation along the stretch. Among these 700+ trees there were several trees that were old grown mature heritage trees that housed thousands of birds, mammals, insects and microorganisms (a good biodiversity). There are a number of trees that are planted for transplanting blah blah...while a lot of them are shrubs forming a kind of layered vegetation, a mini version of forest setting that we generally see in a typical forest ecosystem. 

However, this vegetation is being ruthlessly cleared either by cutting or simply dumping construction debris on it in order to ensure fast tracking the DEVELOPMENT process. My fellow citizens Satya and Uma said that they are giving LIVE samadhi to these trees in Marathi it is 'Jivant Samadhi'.

The way this is taking place is simply mindless and illogical, because there's no point in clearing old grown existing trees and dense vegetation just to create newly grown green grass patches along with other manicured vegetation and concrete structures. Definitely there has to be a way out in order to make our riverfront sustainable! 

Trees and shrubs dumped under the debris

The basic LACK of understanding in HOW the riverbed functions, WHAT are its features and WHAT ecosystem services it offers can be clearly seen here. The river water is full of water hyacinth (green that we don't want) and is smelly. Since this stretch is also part of the Boat club there's plan to have boating activity here, however unless we have consistent clean running water in the rivers, boat rides or any activity along the river is worthless. The river is dead, needs restoration!  

Water hyacinth in the river

Apart from this destruction, the scene at the construction labor colony, had been a disheartening scene too. The workers, their families and young ones are residing in tin sheet temporary hutments and facing the scorching heat waves. However these hutments are being sheltered by the full grown trees demarcated to be cleared. What an irony! 

Construction workers colony

Seeing their condition and the destructive site work just gives one an understanding that how careless and ignorant is the overall process of riverfront development! They say project intends to give quality of life to the citizens but it does not reflect in the process! 

If then it is said that WE the environmentalist or activists or whatever names they call us are against development then YES, we are! Because this is 2023 and we are still functioning as if we are in the 1980's when we knew the word 'sustainability' without knowing its meaning. We never valued our people and our environment but now is the time we better adhere to the present norms and align ourselves to the Sustainable Development Goals in order to save ourselves.  

With the rising heat and abrupt changes in day to day weather because of the Climate crisis that we all are in, we cannot afford this careless, mindless, money minting attitude. Lets ensure our economy thrives but so does our environment and our people!!!

As a concerned citizen I want answers to all the so-called development happening in the city as to where are we heading???

We need our basic services in place, listing some of them below.

• Pollution free spaces. 
• Clean rivers.
• Safe public spaces.
• Pothole free roads.
• Appropriate shaded parking spaces. 
• Efficiently managed traffic.
• Safe walking and cycling spaces.
• Less or only required flyovers (and NO flyovers at the expense of our hills).
• Efficient waste management services (segregation first by citizens of course!) with 100% organic waste managed at source (compost/biogas/biochar).
• 100% treatment of wastewater and using this water for construction activities reducing load on local fresh water sources. 
• Efficient, consistent and clean sources of electricity and sustainable water supply. 
• Rainwater harvesting wherever feasible and 100% for residential complexes.
• Conservation of existing aquifers, green spaces, heritage areas and our hills and water bodies. 

More can be added to the list. Please share your opinion on this poll: Click here

Unless we have these in place, we DON'T need any beautified riverfront that compromises our natural ecosystem services and paints artificial green picture having a dark black future!

Pournima Agarkar.

www.samuchit.com

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MUSINGS FROM PRIYADARSHINI KARVE: Is Sustainable Urbanisation Realistic?

In the last week's MUSING I raised several questions regarding urbanisation. A similar brainstorming a couple of years ago got me thinking about sustainable urbanisation, and I started reading up on the same, and discussing some half baked ideas with other people. This in turn lead me to be part of an initiative - participatory environmental audit of an eduational campus. 

For any system to be sustainable, it should meet two conditions:

1. All the input resources required to keep  the system up and running should be either renewable/recyclable, or inexhaustible.

2. The lifecycle of any resource inputting into the system should be highly efficient and produce minimal ‘waste’ and pollution. 

An urban ecosystem in turn is a complex of several sub-systems. Think about your own urban neighbourhood, if you live in a city, or any urban neighbourhood that you may have visited. There are:

- houses (from high rise buildings and mansions to slums and shanties), shops (from malls to general stores to roadside vendors), 

- schools and colleges, health care centers (from individual doctor's consulting rooms to hospitals), 

- service industries (restaurants, hotels, ticketing agents, couriers, car mechanics, electronics and electric repair shops, barbers, tailors, etc.), 

some manufacturing units (metal fabricators, furniture makers, food processors like bakeries, etc.), 

- public service providers like post offices, banks, bus depots, local train stations, fire stations, municipal ward offices, etc., 

- features like gardens, open plots, natural wilderness, lakes, sections of river, hills, etc., 

- infrastructure also includes roads, footpaths, cycle tracks, train tracks, bridges, traffic intersections, gardens, water supply systems, electric supply systems, phone lines, ehternet cables, sewage system, waste collection/management system, etc. 

Each of these can be viewed as a subsystem and we can examine it through the lens of the above two conditions. If we can make each subsystem sustainable to the best extent possible, and then also establish the logical linkages between the subsystems, the urban system, which is the complex of all of these, can become environmentally sustainable.  

So where do we start? The logical place to start is educational institutes in urban areas. There are several advantages of this starting point. 

* Today's students are tomorrow's drivers of economy. It is to be hoped that if they get a first hand understanding of environmental sustainability, they may embrace the basic principles as a way of life at homes and work places. 

* An educational campus is a miniature version of the city itself, but at a much smaller and manageable scale. 

* Since environmental education is part of the curricula in all streams of education, any activity carried out to assess and improve environmental 

sustainability of the campus can be carried out as a curricular or co-curricular activity. 

* The managements of educational campuses should be receptive to the idea because in the long run, minimising material and energy use translates into monetary savings. 

So how do we improve the environmental sustainability of an educational campus? The first step in the process is to do an environmental audit. If we want people to take ownership of a process, then it is important to involve them in the process. So we need a methodology for a participatory environmental audit. 

The thinking evolved along these lines, and in the process I also interacted with several other likeminded people. The concept is still evolving, but we have come up with a methodology and have already carried out the process for a couple of educational campuses. The outcomes have been enriching both for the institutions and for the teams that have been involved in the process. The team at each location has included some of us as experts/consultants, as well as the teachers and students of the institutions. 

From my personal perspective, being part of this process has given me a better insight into how an urban ecosystem can be pushed towards maximum possible sustainability within practical constrains. The exercise has also given me the belief that sustainable urbanisation is realistically possible. There are however some challenges... but more about this, next week!  

Priyadarshini Karve

Director 

Samuchit Enviro Tech

#BeModernBeResponsibleBeRespectful

    Samuchit Enviro Tech.     samuchit@samuchit.com     www.samuchit.com