The Solar Generation team : the entire solar generation team at Bhubaneshwar before the expedition. From left - Amrit Bakshi, Salil Mukhia, Shashank Srinivasan, Kruttika Vishwanathan, Soumya Tripathi (local guide), Radhika Timbadia, Akshay, and Anmol Basnet.
That crime is climate change. The perpetrators are
industrialised nations. Their weapon is global greenhouse gases.
The victim is our planet. And the investigators are a group of
young clean energy activists, just back from the SolarGeneration
HotSpots Tour of Orissa.
"If we turn a blind eye to this crime, we are perpetrator,
accessory and victim, all rolled into one," said Salil Mukhia,
co-ordinator of the Solar Generation HotSpots Tour. "The planet
simply can't afford that indifference. So we've documented
everything, and we're presenting our findings in
Montreal this November."
The team travelled from Bhubaneshwar to Konark and then on to
the coastal districts of Kendrapara, Jagatsinghpura, Puri, and
finally to Chilka lake, Asia's largest inland salt-water
lagoon.
The mission of the HotSpots Tour was to record what climate
change meant to the common man in real terms. The Tour documentary
captures the hardships faced by people due to rise in sea levels -
entire villages are on their way to getting submerged. Already,
there's a fall in agricultural productivity due to saline and sand
ingress, and crops traditionally grown here can no longer by
produced due to the dramatic change in climate.
The SolarGeneration also estimates that health problems in
effected areas can only be further compounded, since the incidence
of vector-borne diseases like malaria is expected to rise sharply.
And the first to feel the full, unfettered impact of climate change
will be local fishing communities.
"It's mind-numbing how, in the face of such dire warnings from
the scientific community, the US and Australia continue to stand
out as rogue states when it comes to recognising the Kyoto
Protocol," added Salil. "We'll be pressurising them in Montreal to
ratify Kyoto because it's the only treaty we have that objectively
addresses the issue of climate change. Any other plan drawn up
behind closed doors by a select club of the world's biggest
polluters just doesn't have any legitimacy."
To the SolarGeneration weaned on standard shock-horror fare from
Hollywood, one thing is painfully clear: The Day After Tomorrow
might have come and gone from screens across the country. But
across the scorched back of Orissa, it's a reality inflicted in
slow and painstaking detail, day after day.
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