In a world where people pay lip service to the environment and discuss global warming at the high tables, 20-year old Rohan Agrawal from Nagpur Maharashtra walks across the country and has now reached Shillong with a message of creating awareness about the hazardous effects of plastics on the environment. Rohan has walked 10,000 kms so far in 720 plus days and has travelled through 26 states of India. His instagram page RohitYatra speaks volumes about his passion to heal the environment. Rohan exhorts every Indian that it is their bounden duty to conserve the environment on a daily basis. His plea is that healing the environment from anthropogenic activities is no longer an option but a compulsion.
It is not known if Rohan has seen and heard of the environmental damage that Meghalaya is daily experiencing from coal mining with no environmental norms in place to sand mining which has virtually destroyed the flow of the waters and has long terms repercussions on the hydrology of the rivers, to limestone mining without any regulations simply because this is a Sixth Schedule state. Although all kinds of environmental laws are in place their enforcement is non-existent or shabby. The recent flash floods that resulted in several deaths is the result of human onslaught on the environment and this on the plea of livelihoods. The word ‘environment’ is often or nearly always conjoined with the word “sustainable.” But when trees are mercilessly brought down to be burnt into charcoal day after day then something is seriously wrong in implementation of environment conservation laws. This is in fact the biggest challenge; the other one being that Meghalaya does not have a vibrant civil society that takes up environmental issues with the seriousness it deserves. Besides the problem with Meghalaya is that roughly about 96 % of forests are under the custodianship of the autonomous district councils (ADCs) and therefore out of the jurisdiction of the State Environment and Forest Department. The ADCs use the revenue from forest products including timber to manage their affairs since they are always short on revenue.
Meghalaya could do with a passionate environmentalist like Rohan Agrawal because although single-use plastics are banned in the State, beyond Shillong and in the rural areas where weekly markets are held single-use plastics are still rampantly used – again because the administration is so distant from the people and awareness is largely lacking among the rural folks. In Meghalaya’s rural areas there is no garbage management system and most of the plastics find their way into water bodies and forests. These are areas not discussed even though they will seriously impinge on Meghalaya’s fragile environment.
