Commerce without conscience
By Manohar Malgonkar

INDIA is the finest country in the world, sab-se-ala. The very soil of this land is gold, and it yields crops of heere-moti, diamonds and pearls. This, of course, is cheap, film-song mush, the opiate for the poverty-line masses. But then Vande Mataram which is like a surrogate national anthem to us also tells us that our land is both sujalam and sufalam, where water is plentiful and the fruit-crops rich.

Maybe we really are rich in fruit, sufalam, particularly in May and June — when little pyramids of fruit line the streets. But sujalam? — alas, no! Just when the newspaper headlines tell us of record high temperatures, they also tell us of water shortages. Is it Bellary or Guntur or Gwalior or Gohad that will first touch the 40°C mark? By the end of April they all do.

The ground underfoot becomes too hot to walk on and the shimmering blue lake only a couple of miles in the distance turns out to be a mirage.

So much for our land being sujalam, because in point of fact, according to experts who make a study of such things, India "with 20 per cent of the earth’s population has only 4 per cent of the earth’s water resources."

Of course, this by itself does not mean that other countries are any more liveable all the year round. Climatically, they’re equally inhospitable in their own way. A week’s stay in the frozen coastline of North America makes one long for the scorching sun of Marwad. The only time I went to Slovakia happened to be during early May. As we got out of the plane at Bratislava we were lashed by a flurry of snow. Bongor in Maine is no answer to Bellary. On the whole the pluses and minuses even out so that any one country becomes just as good — or as bad — to live out one’s days in.

Holland. Land of tulips and some of the world’s finest paintings. I was there one year in late October. The sky was covered by dark, treetop-level stagnant clouds. The street lights were never switched off for the three days I was there. It was like living in a cave where the sun never penetrated and even the sky had been shut out. Was that why the Dutch painters were so obsessed with sunlight? I was the guest of friends who looked after me well, but I longed to escape — and did.

But somehow a town bathed in glorious Indian sunshine where, too, I was a guest of the management, affected me even worse than Amsterdam — Jamshedpur, in Bihar, the jewel in the crown of a great business empire.

Here the setting is dramatically perfect: Low, forested hills, a lake, a river. Its streets are broad and lined with exotic flowering trees, it has trim, neatly painted bungalows with vivid green lawns and carefully tended gardens; it has playing fields, clubs, social centres, a hospital, schools, even a bazar — it has everything.

But I doubt if anyone would choose to live in Jamshedpur. The town sits in a cradle formed by low hills of slag which are burning all the time. They hiss and sizzle when it rains and, during night, throw up a weird pink glow into the sky. Whenever you’re out of doors, you’re staring at those hills, fascinated by the spurts of red and yellow flames making patterns against the black background.

The fact is that you cannot have a steel industry without those burning hills, and Jamshedpur is said to be easier to live in than similar steel-cities of Europe and America. If you want to see how bad a steel city can be, you must go to the Communist lands, I was told.

Well, I happened to be in the erstwhile Czechoslovakia — a Communist showpiece — only a year before Communism collapsed and that shotgun union of Czechs and Slovaks came apart. When I asked the lady who was showing us round if I might see a steel mill, she pretended not to understand. If the republic had an industrial base at all, it was out of bounds for tourists. Our group was sponsored by some literary association, and thus entitled to special privileges. We were shown the beauty spots and treated to boozy luncheons in country-houses of booted-out noblemen which had been put to use as clubs for the elite of the new regime.

The Czech Republic is a small country, and it is possible that one of the ideal townships we were taken to was Kaspersks Hory, all but hidden in a dark forest. It seems that the residents of that sleepy town are now being offered the choice between money and beautiful surroundings. That is because substantial deposits of gold are said to lie buried deep underground in the environs of their town.

The state, that is the Czech Republic, has sold the rights for extracting the gold to a Canadian firm, but the citizens are exercising their right to stay put on their holdings. "Oh, we’ll make sure that we don’t harm the environment," the lessees have offered. "We’ll pay you $ 200,000 every year, if you will only let us go ahead with the prospecting. More, if there is any damage, we’ll set aside an extra million dollars to put it right."

But the citizens of Kersperks Hory are unmoved. "Everyone knows what mining would bring," they say, and are going ahead with a signature campaign to make the state government annuls the lease.

That is just it. No matter what promises the industrialists make, there is no way to prospect and extract ores from the bowels of the earth without causing some damage. A glaring example of what mining can do to a beautiful countryside is to be seen in Northern Goa, which is now a self-destructed blasted heath, a permanent wound on the face of the earth.

Luckily, Goa, too, like the citizens of Kasperske Hory, seems determined to guard such beauty spots that still remain in it from the pressures of materialism. Indeed, if anything, they’re a step ahead of the Czechs in that here, the State itself has taken the lead and declared the Mhadali valley, one of its last remaining scenic areas to be an ‘eco-sensitive zone’ and thus not open for any kind of commercial exploitation.

Alas, not all people who are lucky enough to live in sylvan surroundings are equally ready to spurn offers of big money because they want to save their environment. Nor are administrators elsewhere so alive to the needs of protecting inherited beauty spots. Politicians everywhere must dance to the tunes of the industrialists, and indeed in countries such as Indonesia and Myanmar, the two work in collaboration to exploit the forests and mineral resources of the land. In India there is no such open collaboration, but then here, too, the men in politics have to depend on the industrialists for donations — for election expenses and other mysterious purposes.

Here, one day in August is set aside for celebrating the vana-mahotsava. On that day ministers must make thundering speeches from public platforms telling us how we must conserve our forest wealth. Then another day in October is set aside for them to tell us that our wild animals are God’s children and every citizen must do what he or she can for their well-being. That done, their consciences are clear. They go and sign away concessions for open-cast mining in wild life sanctuaries, and for setting up corrosive industries deep within rain forests.

And as to keeping our rivers free of industrial wastes we have environment boards in each state and even an Environment Ministry at the centre. What more can one do to keep our country sujalam, and sufalam?

Which is why that proclamation by the Goa Government declaring the Mhadali valley to be a protected area is something to sing about.

Just by chance I happened to drive through that valley early this year. It is still the same valley depicted in sketches drawn by Lopez Mendez in the nineteenth century. Mario Miranda and I got out of the car to, as it were, drink in the scene. It was heartening to think that at least one beauty spot was going to be passed on intact to the 21st century.