Pictures courtesy: Adriaan Louw / Red Bull Content Pool
June 5 is World Environment Day. In India, car manufacturers do their bit and conduct pollution camps where cars are checked for their pollution and accordingly they do the needful. As for the government and bodies like NGT, everybody does a wish-washy job, whether it is banning diesel cars with engine capacities of 2000cc and above (The weirdest thing to do especially when these are all BS 4 complaint engines and are the least polluting) or merely enforcing an odd-even exercise (another equally weird thing to do when India cities and towns are polluted to such high levels).
NGT, the best part about it, is they want publicity. If the body really wants to check pollution of all kinds, it needs to walk around Indian cities and towns and into its forest lands. Let me give you an example. Somewhere in a forest land adjacent to Vasant Vihar and Vasant Kunj in New Delhi’s South West area, there is pollution on the rise. Hundreds of acres of land have become a dumping ground for trash, burnt waste and is being destroyed by encroachment. Motown India has photographic evidence of that.
Similarly, forest lands on the outskirts of Delhi in Gurgaon are encroached by religious factions for building their religious places. The illegal encroachments are bound to pollute the forest lands. In forest lands in the midst of Vasant Kunj in New Delhi, forest lands have been encroached upon in a big way. All over India, the situation is a hundred times worse.
NGT has to step down from its high and mighty seat and see the ground realities if it really wants to check pollution. But do you think they really care? By stopping economic development (banning cars, stopping the Metro lines from expanding, etc) bodies like the NGT are going to simply harm the country’s growth.
But far away from India in distant Africa, positive environmental actions are being celebrated in the right way. For South Africa’s Thabang Mabapa working on turning castor oil into a biodiesel,is a daily matter.
An agriculture and energy entrepreneur, Mabapa founded Selokong Sa Dimelana, an organisation that focuses on the farming, processing and distribution of castor oil and cake for biodiesel purposes, in 2013.
He found a chief in Limpopo who was prepared to give him some land, and he got growing. More than 60 local people have got involved as volunteers, tilling the land, planting bushes and harvesting the beans every three months.
Now supported by Red Bull Amaphiko, Mabapa started out extracting the oils in his mother’s kitchen and is currently using lab facilities at the University of Wits in Johannesburg before working towards his own factory facilities.
“My dream is to do the farming and the processing in Limpopo so that people here can have that skillset,” he says, adding that “I want us to grow, to supply the whole of Africa, and produce tons and tons of biodiesel.”
Now that’s doing something really positive for the environment! Maybe India needs to learn something from Africa!
Source: Motown India / Red Bull
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