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Making earth matter

Menka Shivdasani

A few months ago, my family decided to take a long overdue break. We decided to go to Shreevardhan, a coastal resort 180 km from Mumbai. A Mumbai-based architect had sunk his life's savings into the resort, which had a spectacular location on a hill over looking the sea, with the beach just two minutes away. He was selling the place as a closer alternative to Goa, and his two USPs were the exquisite coastline and the excellent seafood.

We returned from that holiday four days ahead of schedule, and exactly a day after our arrival. All it took was a morning's drive along this beautiful coastline. The sea, and the beaches that dotted it, were black. Not grey, not brown, but black. My husb and, who had once been actively involved in the environmental movement, was so upset that he took photographs, hoping to draw the attention of activist friends to the problem. He knelt down on the sand with the camera and came up with a knee so black wit h oil that it took at least a week to clean off.

Lunch that day, before we left for home, was vegetarian; there was no question of poisoning ourselves with the seafood that had been caught locally.

For us, this was just a holiday gone sour, but what of the poor man who had found this beautiful spot to set up a resort that should have had everything going for it? Would he ever recover his investment in the project -- or find compensation for a dream that had clearly been destroyed for no fault of his own?

I was thinking about the incident while watching Earth Matters on Tuesday on DD Metro. Eight a.m. on DD Metro is reserved for programmes with some business focus: On Mondays it is T. N. Ninan's The Week in Business, a programme that is well put together, but which should seriously consider changing its name since it is more feature- than news-based (there were, for instance, no references to the earthquake or the Tehelka tapes on the Mondays that immediately followed the events). Tuesdays are reserved f or Earth Matters, and while I suspect these shows are old ones being recycled, they are watchable. Wednesday mornings are reserved for India Online, an IT show.

This week, Earth Matters focussed on the state of the oceans, our ``last frontier''. It is a global heritage that is under threat worldwide, and we in India are not doing anything to ease matters. The coastline spans nine States in our country, as Earth Matters pointed out, and is 8,100 km long. More than 18 per cent of the population depends on it for its livelihood, with a marine production of 2.7 tonnes a year, much of it brought in by traditional small scale fishermen who finding their catches decli ning every year. In 1996, fishermen found their catches had dwindled from two tonnes a trip to a mere 300-500 kg a catch; what would these figures be today, five years later?

The industrial pollution is bad enough, with raw sewage being dumped into the oceans. More horrifying is the fact that nuclear waste is being poured into the seas. Radioactive waste, Earth Matters pointed out, remains for tens of thousands of years, and apart from affecting marine life, also seeps into the soil and affecting the food we eat and the air we breathe.

``We will have to double our food production in the next 30 years and with all available land already under cultivation, we will have to turn to the ocean,'' Mr Mike Pandey, the presenter of the show, said. ``We cannot treat the ocean the way we have tre ated the earth.''

Could it already be too late? Think about that when you plan your beach vacation this summer.

Another very watchable show this week was CNBC India's Head South, a special two-part series hosted by Mr Govindraj Ethiraj. Mr Ethiraj, a relative newcomer to CNBC, has quickly become one of the stars of the channel. CNBC should hold on to him; he is sh arp, comes across well on television, and makes a good interviewer, always allowing his guests to say their piece and cutting in unobtrusively at just the right moments. Mr Ethiraj is one of the few journalists I know who have successfully made the trans ition from print to television media; he was once my colleague at a business magazine, and quite clearly, his talents were wasted there.

In the first of the series this Sunday, he interviewed Mr S. M. Krishna, chief minister of Karnataka, who spoke of how the biggest challenge was building infrastructure. ``I am hoping that in the next three years we will get a reasonably good airport,'' he said. ``We realise we lost a precious six years debating where the airport should be located. In some ways I feel cheated; by now we should have a good airport for Bangalore.''

Mr Krishna also spoke of initiatives for roads, power, water and other crucial factors, and said that to find a qualitative difference in infrastructure in Bangalore, he would need a minimum of one year. As for the rest of the Karnataka, ``things are hap pening'' too.

There is something about Mr Krishna's manner that makes you think he is not like most politicians, mouthing empty words and cheap promises. For instance, he pointed out: ``We have taken care to prudently manage our resources. We do not go in for populist programmes''. There was no mention of programmes such as providing rice at Rs 2 a kilo, but surely that was the sort of thing he was referring to. He said: ``Ultimately the health of a state is not judged by the number of IT companies, or cement compani es but how well you have managed its finances. That is the litmus test.''

Mr Krishna's interview will be followed by one with Mr Chandrababu Naidu on Sunday night, and should certainly be worth watching.