Neglecting environment at whose peril?
By Reeta Sharma

MY heart sank when I overheard an undergraduate topper of DAV College remark, "Yaar, don’t bother too much about the paper on environment because its marks are not included in the final aggregate." This boy, who lives across my house, is well-meaning, hard-working and compared to the present-day youth, is extremely humble.

Something has to be terribly wrong with our system if a good citizen dismisses a paper on environment as irrelevant and unimportant. For 50 years, our elected governments and syllabus makers simply neglected the most important aspect of our lives — environment. As a result, today we have both the literate and the illiterate viewing everything about environment as someone else’s problem. And how can it be otherwise when our people do not know even the ABC about the environment. When not even a tear is shed upon finding that truckloads of chopped trees are smuggled out of the country, it means that there is little awareness about the subject. How many people know about the dangerous effects of deforestation? Even in a place like Chandigarh, where environment-related issues at least get highlighted in the print media, the Administration did not hesitate to order the cutting of 60 to 70 years old peepal trees in the Sector 23 market because it wanted to build a post office there. None of the officials bothered to locate an alternative site.

Justifying the saying, "Better late than never", the Supreme Court directed educational institutions to make the study of environment compulsory at the undergraduate level. Since in our country nothing moves without a danda, the universities and the syllabus-makers, who had earlier paid little thought to include this important subject in the syllabi, readily obeyed the directive. But, unfortunately, we only make half-hearted efforts.

Panjab University introduced the subject, making it compulsory, but ensured that the students did not pay much attention to it by not including its evaluation in the final aggregate. The authorities concerned say that to have environment as a regular subject, they will have to appoint at least one teacher in each college. And it is difficult to meet this requirement for two reasons: one, teachers qualified to teach this subject are not available and, two, it would affect the already fragile financial situation. This itself speaks volumes about the ignorant and indifferent attitude that our educationists have towards this subject.

Panjab University, which has been bungling the examination paper on environment since the year it was introduced, has always had the Board of Studies decide the syllabus of any subject and its related instructions. However, for the subject of environment it formed a huge committee of nearly 20 persons. This committee took a strange decision that a student who had attended seven lectures in one year would be exempted from appearing in the examination on environment. On what basis did this committee conclude that seven lectures on environment were enough to make a student knowledgeable about the subject? And the committee’s decision surely defeats the very purpose of introducing this subject. Unless the university authorities make this subject compulsory and add its marks to the aggregate percentage, the subject will never hold any value for the students. It is the percentage which pushes many a student to excel and master a subject.

Besides, it is high time our universities offered courses in various branches of environment. The very fact that we do not even have qualified teachers to teach this subject shows the little concern our successive governments had for this issue in the past 50 years. It is no wonder then that Delhi, with only 6 per cent forest cover, is choking with pollution. The callous felling of forests in all states, the flow of domestic and industrial waste into the rivers and the fast disappearance of water bodies are all indicators of our collective ignorance about the environment.

Even though the subject was introduced a couple of years ago, our students continue to use polythene bags and remain indifferent to the littering of any public place that they use. They do not pause even for a moment when they see polythene bags clogging roadside drains — a common sight in the towns and cities of Punjab and Haryana. Our students still remain unaffected by trees being felled and axed, be it in their own homes, the neighbourhood or their respective cities. Their conscience doesn’t get pricked when their mothers dump the garbage on the roadside. They are still not aware that traffic pollution, burning of dry leaves, cutting of trees, dumping of garbage, industrial waste, emersion of bodies, ashes and other religious material into the flowing waters are all steps that would be detrimental to our environment.

Incidentally, the committee has recommended only one book on environment to students while there are many other important books in the market covering the required syllabus. I personally feel the subject of environment should be introduced from Class I. Like patriotism, it cannot be tutored and inculcated in a person unless one has grown with it from day one. Like a child is taught not to pluck flowers, he must be trained to respect and protect his environment, too.