Tribals, the climate change warriors at Copenhagen

Climate change is upon them and is changing life as they knew it. With rising temperature and erratic rains threatening their very existence, India's most vulnerable want to be heard and helped, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Oct 29, 2009, 01:08:40 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Climate change is upon them and is changing life as they knew it.

With rising temperature and erratic rains threatening their very existence, India's most vulnerable want to be heard and helped.

“Hear us” is their call and to be heard, 16 of them will be at Copenhagen in December as countries will sit down once again to discuss climate change.

“The landowners in our village have been reduced to rickshaw pullers because of declining rainfall,” said Jasan Bhai Maldhari from Kutch in western Gujarat.

Gujarat’s rising farm production may fall after 2020 with global warming drying up water sources, agriculture ministry has warned.

In a report in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified 400 million Indians living in impoverished villages, coastal areas and Himalayan region as most vulnerable to climate change.

Maldhari, 55, will be among the Dalits and tribals from the coastal regions of Orissa and West Bengal, backward areas of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and hills of Nagaland representing India’s poor at the Danish capital.

They’ll submit a community charter on climate change.

The charter, released in Delhi on Wednesday, seeks insurance cover for crops, traditional farming practices and permission to grow and rejuvenate forests, and warriors against climate change tag for villagers.

“When I was young, the poor in our village used to earn enough from their land, not anymore,” said Maldhari. “Emissions and dirty water from industries have made soil infertile.”

Thousands of kms away in Orissa, Dongria tribe is facing a similar situation.

“There are less rains. We haven't had a good crop in last four years,” said Sindha Wadaka. Her tribe has been reduced to only 9,000 and in Copenhagen, she'll tell the world how climate changed it all for her people.

Many of her tribesmen have been forced to move to the cities and government stats say that the number of such climate change refugees is rising. Rapidly changing weather trends have forced them out of their fields.

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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