Date -21/11/2010
“Progression of our nation towards Go Green” 1. Introduction
You only have to look around and think to understand and realize the graveness and urgency, of why we need to “Go Green”. The computer you are using to view this document is guzzling up power and generating heat from its processor, thus adding to its carbon footprint, this is without mentioning the hazardous metals used while making it. The clothes that you are wearing might have been made in Bangladesh and then transported using expensive and scarce fuels across borders. The milk in the Tetra-pack in your fridge does a pretty good job of protecting the milk from bacterial infection, but then one wonders how will the six-layered plastic coated paper will ever be recycled? Will it not be cost-effective to just produce new paper? It is little things like this which do not matter for an individual but matter a lot on an aggregate level. Even if one does consciously reduces ones carbon footprint and avoids all the things mentioned above, but then wont his enthusiasm and motivation to repeat such actions will go down the drain when he comes to know of his counter-part in a developing economy who has just got his new car and then takes it for a long ride thus nullifying all good our protagonist has done to better the environment.
In the past, many successive Indian governments knowingly or unknowingly had failed to realize the magnanimity of reduction in greens and subsequent increase in pollution across the country. The problem was compounded by illiteracy, unemployment and poverty in rural India, whereas in cities the greed of builders, their political, bureaucratic and sundry accomplices kept on encroaching on the greens. There were hardly any laws, and even these limited laws were violated without restraint. The real culprits were never punished nor did they felt threatened.
Fate of Mangroves in Mumbai
The case of the mangrove trees in