‘Misquoted’ man of the mountain feels the heat

In 1985, a hydrology professor was handed over a project to look into the glaciers of Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal. His research paper was published in international journals. And thus began the career of one of India’s most well known glaciologists, who was awarded the Padmashree in 2009.

Updated on: Jan 23, 2010, 23:03:23 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan

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In 1985, a hydrology professor was handed over a project to look into the glaciers of Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal. His research paper was published in international journals. And thus began the career of one of India’s most well known glaciologists, who was awarded the Padmashree in 2009.

Born in Muzzafarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, Syed Iqbal Hasnain has often been considered as Mr Dial-a-Quote on the subject of the Himalayan glacier. He was one of the few people outside the government system who could talk about glaciers. The reputation got a jolt when the London-based newspaper The Sunday Times reported that in an interview to the magazine New Scientist in 1999, Hasnain had claimed that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. And now with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) having picked up this figure, Hasnain can’t wait to clear his name.

“I was misquoted,” says the former professor from JNU. “How can I predict the demise of the Himalayan glaciers? I merely gave an approximation that in the next 40 to 50 years, many of the glaciers would melt.”

Hasnain’s claims have often kept him in the news. One of the first things that he’d ever declared was that the Gangotri glacier, the source of the Ganga, was melting at a faster rate (up to 30 metres a year) because of pilgrim pressure and global warming. Then, a decade ago, he attributed the phenomenon, to black carbon — emission from kerosene stoves and burning of diesel burning. And now there’s this.

Mountaineer Karanjeet Singh whose father Sarbjeet Singh had campaigned against Hasnain’s claims, calls the professor an alarmist. “My father trekked on many of the glaciers that Hasnain has talked about. He found that neither the pilgrims nor heavy cooking stoves were causing the glaciers to melt. The idea was simply a figment of his imagination, there is no scientific research to back his claim.”

In fact, in 2009 the environment ministry contradicted his claim, by reporting that the Gangotri glacier has been melting at a rate of 16 meters a year and the retreat has slowed down in the last two decades.

Now, a senior fellow with Delhi’s The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), which is headed by RK Pachauri of IPCC, Hasnain insists that his research was based on sound international scientific standards and put forth a list of 38 research papers he’s published. He believes that he is “realistic rather than an alarmist”, and feels that the work he has done over the last quarter of a century is now under scrutiny. “For the last 25 years, I have tried to tell people about the real state of affairs of our glaciers, but nobody really wants to listen to me.” It was trouble when a lot of people did.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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