Friday, September 12, 2008

Green Polity.

With Lok Sabha elections stated to fall next year, government and other parties are already in poll mood. This fact is only strengthened by the announcement of a sop a day. Though state elections (MP) may also fall next year but polices at the national level hold much more importance than those at state level. Every party will be having agendas; few very close to their heart and few will be those garnered during the course of past five years. But the important fact that remains to be seen which party is going to take risk to go green. With going green I meant to say, which party is going to raise voice against global warming, increasing pollution, depleting forest cover, extinction of animals as a part of their national level manifesto.
At present I see no party with green in their cards, and none who will rise above their colours be it blue, red or saffron.  Indian flag though have green in 1/3 of its area which shows our love for green but it somehow does not translates to love for ecosystem. What can we hope if none of the probable talks about ecology and global warming, and aren’t such issues above the process of policy making? Policies are fine, but they need to be ported to real time conditions and this fact is well understood by all including you, politicians and me. India is one of those countries which posses large amount of biological diversity and also some of the very delicate ones. And if not taken care of then they will only remain in the text books for students in school and that too will come after a decade owing to late modification in text books. There are too many of questions than answers. As we the general public still do not know whether any of the party is taking climate change issue seriously or not. Adding to that we also do not know which party is greener of the lot, as I suppose no one have yet ranked them on this issue.
There may be some arguments that climate change is not seen as a major problem by most of the public, and inflation will rule the election season this time. One can agree to this fact but still I do not fine people in general ignorant of this topic as such and they might just not prioritizing it highly when compared to price rise and other economical parameters. But on any given day if you sit and explain public that how ecological change will lead to adverse economical change then there would be really very few not giving you ears. Indian polity in general thrives on this very ignorance of general public or we can also say that it thrives on lack of any positive action by the public. There is regular reporting of illegal mining but there is no reporting of any positive action taken by the government and on to that there is no questioning by the public and since there had been no system of public questioning there has been no answering system either.
If we go deeper into the mud puddle we might end up finding lack of political will to curb any illegal activity harming ecology. So we can say that, its not important what parties are saying but what parties may do, and we all know the quantum of difference between the two. Climate change is inevitable at both global and local level, and its really a high time to check whether the part or person we are going to elect sees the future clearly or not, or is it still sticking to the past.