Planting seeds of conservation
Dr Varsha Kamat
Our society has been getting a standing ovation for the uncanny politicization of every little issue that can be connected to environment in the name of greens. `Not in my backyard’ (Nimby) has been the benchmark hypocrisy of our social ethos. We want the luxury of remaining connected to the outside world sometimes through as many as three mobile numbers, but we don’t want a mobile tower in our village; we want our child to be exposed to the rigours of the best heavyweight school curriculum with 20 kg bags strapped on their innocent gentle shoulders, barely supported by 40 kg bodies; but we don’t want them to cross a safety over-bridge, which are otherwise accepted world over in the larger interests of school-going children.
Hearty congratulations to our environment minister, Alina Saldanha, an educationist herself, who has taken a bold, herculean task of proposing an experimental effort of inculcating a value-based minimal waste-material home-collection drive with students. She proposes that domestic waste collection and disposal (under parental guidance) and other such eco-friendly educational projects should be made a part of assignments/projects in the school curriculum. This could give the students marks as well as make them environmentally-aware citizens. All well educated families from the beginning of mankind have always handpicked these ideas and incorporated them in the well-being of their children, in the larger pursuit of making them complete, global citizens.
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Not that there were no domestic help at home. Critically-acclaimed opponents of such initiatives might well be from the nouveau rich families who look down on the biblical values of dignity of labour. “From dust thou art, to dust thou shall return” may also be interpreted that finally all need to value the fact that all will come and return back to the same mother earth. Teaching children to collect plastic and material waste from home and training them to wash our washrooms, basins and bath chambers are indeed signs of a progressive society.
For those who shun this, all I can say is that it’s time these earthly siblings of mine understand the need to inculcate these initiatives for globalisation of our next generation. Life, growth, environment, a green earth, dignity in cleansing efforts are not mere acts of politicisation of our noble minister’s efforts, but are indeed complete symbols of a progressive society.
Let’s join hands in at least one more government dream. Alas it may not have the conventional RFQs (request for qualifications), DPRs (detailed project reports), tender values, financial bids, class 1 or 2 contractors. It’s our children who will change this planet. It has to start from my own backyard the apolitical way. We have freely inherited the globe from our ancestors and centuries ahead our great grand children should not raise the sword of mutiny on our nondescript failed calculations on garbage and waste that we snatched away from their good destiny. If Gandhiji could clean his toilets and yet be the father of the nation, can we not at least germinate these seeds of an uprising of civic multi-centric human apathy towards domestic garbage?
