 "Dear
Prime Minister, stop listening to your bureaucracy and start searching for solutions
yourself. Make water everybody’s business. For those villagers who have
learnt the value of the millennial Indian tradition of managing their own water resources,
even this drought has become manageable. Life is bearable and the need to flee has gone
down. And the people are proud of their achievements. Decentralisation of water
management will mean loss of power. It will mean a lot of loss for ‘pocket
money’, both for your political colleagues as well as for a lot of bureaucrats."Down To Earth, January 15, 2000 "Getting rid of the colonised mind is far more difficult than getting rid of the colonisers themselves. The way in which our so-called highly prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology and Roorkee University have only taught the Western models makes me feel that they were keen to make our engineers the children of that arch-colonialist Lord Macaulay, who wanted all of us to be like the British, instead of making our engineers the children of Gandhi." Editor’s page, Down To Earth, February 15, 2000 "Politicians must stop protecting their dinosaur-age oil and automobile industries. It is imperative that the world tries to make the Kyoto Protocol both ecologically and socially effective. The world’s poor who are not locked into a fossil fuel economy and therefore, underutilise their share of the global atmospheric space should be given entitlements to their share of the global commons." Editor’s page, Down To Earth, March 15, 2000 "I am not just angry but livid with the political system and the media. Our ‘capable’ politicians did some public breast beating on young Kumaramangalam’s untimely death and the media reported this ritual without any thought. He had a form of blood cancer. Having suffered from another form of cancer, I have some idea of what it takes to deal with cancer. As an environmentalist, I have a deep interest in the role of pollution, lifestyles and diets in its causation. But there was not one substantive political statement or media report on how to deal with this horrible disease on which there is nothing but a conspiracy of silence from the Government." Conspiracy of Silence, The Hindu, September 24, 2000
"The latest of the world's moralisers is a group called environmentalists, especially Western environmentalists. They must recognise that there are fundamental flaws in using trade as a tool for controlling environmental misbehaviour. The use of trade sanctions can be effective only if used by a powerful country against a less powerful country. Can nations likely to be most affected by global warming — the Maldives and Bangladesh — impose trade sanctions on the US and expect to be effective?" Editor’s page, Down To Earth, November 15, 2000 "It is possible to banish drought completely — and in ten years maximum if the government puts its mind to it. Drought is not a ‘natural disaster’. It is truly a ‘government made’ disaster. Rain water harvesting is a powerful low-cost technology that can drought-proof our nation." Briefing Paper to Parliamentarians and
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