Many who clamour about the heat wave hitting Shillong these days don’t actually exercise their minds about why this has happened and how. Senior member of the United Democratic Party (UDP), former minister and now MLA of Amlarem constituency in the War-Jaintia area, Lahkmen Rymbui, has lamented that construction is happening right on the river without any concern about the environmental cost that this violation will extract. Rymbui has given a clarion call to use relevant sections of the law to prevent encroachment along rivers. But this call has come a little too late in the day. A look at the Umkhrah river front is testimony to how the moneyed class have encroached and built structures thereby reducing the width of the river. This is visible along the stretches of all rivers in Meghalaya today. How was this allowed to happen? Is it not because building by-laws are violated with impunity by the very people who are elected to be lawmakers?
Rymbui who was once the Minister in Charge of Environment and Forests, himself hails from a region where limestone quarrying has devastated the environment beyond recognition. It’s as if the environment itself is being exported to Bangladesh where hundreds of trucks are lined up at the border to transport coal, limestone, boulders and sand. The District Councils which claim to be the custodians of forests, rivers and minerals don’t seem to be bothered that the rivers are drying up and so are the catchment areas where forests have been cut down mercilessly to feed the sawmills that at one time were shut down by the Supreme Court when it banned tree cutting and the timber business unless cleared by a committee of the State Environment and Forest Department that is to prepare the working plans. In the absence of supervision all this has been forgotten and it’s back to the go as you please policy.
The UDP is a partner in the MDA government and hence it would have been in order for Rymbui to draw the attention of the Government to this heavy onslaught on rivers. The Meghalaya High Court too has directed the State Government not to allow any construction to come up within 50 metres of the highwater mark of a water body without the express leave of the Court. The problem is that the State Government has been lax in the application of its own laws and therefore asking it to be the policeman is fraught. Rymbui had pointed out to the recent tragedies in Himachal Pradesh where human intervention and ruthless construction has wreaked havoc and caused loss of lives and property on a large scale. With climate change well and truly entrenched in this state as is evident by the rising temperatures, cloudbursts cannot be ruled out and landslides which are a common phenomenon here and have caused human tragedies will cause havoc. Hence conservation of rivers and forests both ought to be a top priority of the Government. What’s more important than human lives, is the question here.
