Amid reports of Haryana Government planning to colonise 23 villages, including the verdant Mangar — an oasis in a wasteland — and continued mining in a notified stretch of the Aravalis in contravention of the Supreme Court ban, the demand to notify the deemed forest area, called Mangarbani, as a reserved / protected forest is a desperate attempt by conservationists to save one of the few fragments of green cover in the State. Haryana’s success story vests in unsustainable development, with expanding concrete jungles devouring rural environs and exhausting water resources. The pitted and battered remains of the Aravali hills bear testimony to this. So far as Mangar is concerned, sustained media coverage since 2008 has drawn attention to this last surviving biosphere in the Haryana Aravalis, which needs to be saved at all cost from depredations by builders. It harbours rare species of plants and trees, a variety of birds and reptiles as well as jackals, mongoose, deer, hares, and even hyenas and leopards. In the past, there were tigers too.
Rather than clearing the forest, or part of it, for a technology park or a residential complex, the arid water-starved State should make all efforts to accord it a protected status, even that of a wildlife sanctuary. Eco-tourism is a viable option to the concrete monstrosity being pushed by promoters, aggressively lobbying since long with policy-makers. It may be noted that the ground-water level has risen here after a ban was imposed in 2002 on the mining of construction material.
Considering the acute water shortage faced by the region, Mangarbani could be an ideal catchment area for the adjoining villages, and in future, residential colonies in the event that promoters manage to get their way. But, strangely, the powers that be are loth to address the water problem, the fact that lakes have dried up or shrunk. Random felling of trees for building purposes compounds the problem.
The Supreme Court-appointed Central Empowered Committee has drawn the apex court’s attention to gross lapses in a recent report. Covert mining and mushrooming of farmhouses not only violates the Forest (Conservation) Act but also the Aravali Notification, issued by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests on May 7, 1992. Under the latter, neither can trees be cut nor construction undertaken in the notified area without permission from the authorities concerned. However, the committee cites the example of Raisina village, where an offender cut down 4,560 trees on a 15-acre expanse of land, where he also built a boundary wall. This has been the story in supposedly prosperous places ever since economic reforms ushered in a construction frenzy, turning our cities and rustic burroughs into a parking place for foreign funds, possibly even slush funds.
The committee notes that in Mewat, not far from the capital, there are an estimated 100 stone crushers. Applications for 50 more stone crushers are pending. Illegal mining thereby gets a great impetus. This needs to be strictly regulated. One can also envisage the lethal increase in the air pollution load because of such work. That a huge environmental crisis is building up is of no concern to policy-makers and ravenous prime real estate promoters, building monoliths and land mafia, global speculators and property agencies, all of whom fervently believe in bartering every inch of land, plundering mines to their bone, destroying forests and finishing off water systems. If the Aravalis are flattened by the construction juggernaut, conservationists have warned, the desert sands of Rajasthan will reach Delhi and NCR towns. That would indeed be a fitting nemesis
The signs of impending doom are beginning to manifest in a fearful way. To cite the most obvious example, in large parts of new Gurgaon, which boasts of swanky condominiums and colonies, MNC offices, shopping malls, pubs, golf course, medical complexes, metro- links and the rest of the trappings of high life, water is drying up. Over-usage of water available from the Yamuna supply from the Hathnikund barrage, and indiscriminate extraction of ground water are not the only reasons for this pathetic situation. Rapid depletion of green cover and denudation of the Aravali hills for construction purposes have also contributed to the ecological disaster. The complete absence of foresight on the part of policy-makers, builders and financiers alike ensures that, in a very short span of time, this city and its satellites will be uninhabitable as water sources prove inadequate for burgeoning needs.
And, it needs to be clearly understood that unleashing further devastation by forcibly channelising water from barrages or dams on rivers flowing through Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, is not the solution. That, in fact, contains the seeds of another environmental disaster. It may be edifying to recall that last July, the Nation Green Tribunal, responding to pleas, spiked the Delhi Government’s plan to divert water to the national capital from the Giri river in Himachal Pradesh via the Renuka dam.
Conservationists point out that diversion of Yamuna waters at Hathnikund by Haryana as it relentlessly colonises has resulted in a sharp drop in the river’s water level downstream while it flows through Delhi and UP. Concretisation of the river bed and ground water recharge area, in the face of opposition by conservationists, has also served to constrict its flow. Wilful ignorance of the logic of sustainable development and mania for concretisation, spurred by the fallacy of high returns-based investment, threaten to turn Haryana, other NCR towns and the contiguous Delhi into a wasteland.
