Leading India! Leading the Revolution!

Gary Halmel Opens a new door at how we look at an era and it’s nuances and get a larger meaning out of it. “Every age brings its own blend of promise and peril, and this age has plenty of both. But there is reason to be more hopeful than fearful, for the age of revolution is presenting us with opportunities never before available to humankind. For the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past. For all of history, human beings have longed to explore other worlds, to reverse the ravages of aging, to transcend distance, to shape their environment, to conquer their destructive moods, to share any bit of knowledge that might exist on the planet.”

“The age of Progress is Over”, emphasizes guru Gary Halmel. It was born in the Renaissance, achieved its exuberant adolescence during the Enlightenment, reached a robust maturity in the industrial age, and died with the dawn of the twenty-first century. For countless millennia there was no progress, only cycles. Seasons turned. Generations came and went. Life didn’t get better, it simply repeated itself in an endlessly familiar pattern. There was no future, for the future was indistinguishable from the past. Then came the unshakable belief that progress was not only possible, it was inevitable. Life spans would increase. Material comforts would multiply. Knowledge would grow. There was nothing that could not be improved upon. The discipline of reason and the deductive routines of science could be applied to every problem, from designing a more perfect political union to unpacking the atom to producing semiconductors of mind-boggling complexity and unerring quality.

We now stand on the threshold of a new age—the age of revolution. In our minds, we know the new age has already arrived; in our bellies, we’re not sure we’re going to like it. For we know it is going to be an age of upheaval, of tumult, of fortunes made and unmade at head-snapping speed. For change has changed. No longer is it additive. No longer does it move in a straight line. In the twenty-first century, change is discontinuous, abrupt, seditious. In a single generation, the cost of decoding a human gene has dropped from millions of dollars to around a hundred bucks. The cost of storing a megabyte of data has dropped from hundreds of dollars to essentially nothing. Global capital flows have become a raging torrent, eroding national economic sovereignty. The ubiquity of the Internet has rendered geography meaningless. Bare-knuckled capitalism has vanquished all competing ideologies and a tsunami of deregulation and privatization has swept the globe.

Leading India today is no less than Leading the Revolution. It’s leading the change as Gary Halmel espouses. And it requires leaders who understand that this Revolution in the context of the constant ‘flux’ which India presents today. Dipan Dey has had a exemplary past as leader who can stir social revolutions at the grass roots.

Can Dipan Dey lead this revolution ?

Environmentalist Dipayan Dey was always sure of doing well in the Lead India contest.

With his disheveled hair and salt-and-pepper beard, Dey, who has attended a GIS fellowship programme of Chicago's De Paul University, an easily pass off as the archetypal absent-minded professor lost in his own world completely oblivious to what is going on around him. For the past decade, he has been doing precisely that. Working closely with the local population and educating them about the need to protect the environment. It had not always been smooth sailing. Scepticism was what greeted him at the beginning.

Here’s what he(Dipayan Dey) has to say:

Service to His creation is service to mankind

My Vision…..

Was Rome built in day? If not, then how can India be?? But every day counts in the building a nation….. so is every man. I remember a small event of my childhood day. In the last bench of my geography class I was sketching the face of my teacher on the back side of a map of India, as I knew map pointing was not a cup of tea for me. Inevitably I was caught. Out of fear I had to tear off the map. My teacher’s punishment was simple. “Reconstruct India” he said, and I was struggling with all the states of torn India, in tears. He saw me struggling. He just said, “Remake my face rightly that you had drawn on the back side of the map.”I can understand today how easy it is to reconstruct India. Every face counts…and every Indian.

Me(Dipayan Dey) ….

I hail from Deoghar, a small town of Bihar with a serene natural beauty and folklore. After graduating in Plant Sciences from here I had opted for higher studies in Plant Biotechnology and had to leave for a metropolis. Though my career started as a postgraduate teacher of biology in reputed higher secondary schools of India, I felt privileged to serve the University of Delhi as an associate professor in Plant Sciences for it’s only out of Campus College in Bhutan.

My assignment in Bhutan was a turning point of my life. The pristine environment of Eastern Himalayas groomed me as an ecologist and extended with opportunities to address environmental problems through community based participatory approach. My works on fresh water high altitude lakes of Eastern Himalayas earned me the first international recognition in 9th International Lake Conference in Otsu, Japan.

Conservation and restitution of agro-environments in different community based projects under the aegis of UNEP, UNDP, UNFPA, Bhutan Trust Fund, British Ecological Society, and Royal Society for Protection of Nature enriched me with a commendable experience and exposure. Awards and grants from Society for Wetland Scientists International, International Society for Restoration Ecology and FAO (UN) not only gave me an international exposure but also inspired me to be committed to the cause of environment in global south.

My research priorities endorsed anthropocentric management approaches integrating reciprocal community participation and adaptive techniques. The prime problem of balancing socioeconomic development together with environmental conservation motivated me to work in a way that complements poverty alleviation with conservation objectives. I had thought of integrating technological innovations with traditional ecological knowledge and implement the same through community based programmes.

Such effort in undertaking a risk assessment study on perilous glacial lake outburst flood earned me the most coveted Kasumiguara International Award in 10th International Lake conference at Chicago. Further a similar research on sustainable development in coastal wetlands of sundarban in India helped me avail a prestigious fellowship from United Nations University to work with the International Coastal Research Center at Iwate Japan.

All these achievements were demanding grassroots’ implementation in the Indian Ecoregion. My humble endeavor started with the installation of a NGO in the name of South Asian Forum for Environment (SAFE). We started working on environment and community through equity, partnership and participation. We initiated the concept of Biorights as a financial tool. Thoughts spread like wild fire, Bhutan to India, Nepal and Bangladesh. More recently in the International Disaster Reduction Conference at Davos Switzerland, delegation from Pakistan also showed interest in joining hands with this south Asian network.

Back at home in India, my work encouraged a handful of youngsters to restore the East Kolkata Wetlands, the only Ramsar site of West Bengal. Active participation and partnership came up from NABARD and Rotary International. Ramsar Secretariat acknowledged our efforts in restoration of this site. SAFE has now become a green movement. People are evolving through this green mission. I dream of a green empowerment for the commons in global south. …but miles to go frens before I sleep……..

….and my Mission

There is a strong need to couple issues of sustainable environmental development with poverty alleviation in the global south. One of the suggested solutions for the poverty problem is to compensate people for managing their natural resources. Biorights could contribute to this by compensating local people in developing countries directly for not degrading the natural environment. Biorights is a concept that tries to protect areas of global biological importance by compensating poor people that live near nature areas and that are dependent of these nature areas for cash generating activities. The hypothesis is that in this way a sustainable rural development is possible as the negative link between poverty and nature degradation will disappear.

In order for biorights to be successful we need cooperation of both the global community and local people in developing countries. The local people, mostly poor farmers need to actively support the idea of biorights as they determine to a large extent what will happen with the nature that surrounds them. For the long term, involvement of the private sector, including the financial world, will be essential if biorights is to become successful.

This can best be achieved by designing and installing a pilot project on Biorights. The goal of the project will be to integrate nature-services like Ecotourism with folklores or indigenous crafts and transform it as a financial tool for poverty alleviation and sustainable environment development through community partnership in peri-urban to rural areas.

Success, by means of these biorights pilot projects, would greatly contribute to the involvement of private initiators and the eventual success of biorights. Besides looking at the “buyers” side of biorights, this study would also investigate the expected behavior towards biorights of the “sellers” side e.g. the farmers in developing countries. In order to find out what compensation payment is needed to get local people’s involvement, the biorights pilot projects has been chosen that would

The monetary value of nature has so far not been recognized by the world community with our current economic system and hence its value is only marginally present in the market. Mostly the costs of nature conservation are visible in the market and only the most obvious benefits. That is why it is not possible at present to make an unbiased cost-benefit analysis of existing nature reserves. Therefore, other tools have to be found that can prioritize nature areas that are the most important to conserve. It will be wiser to aim at areas in developing third world that also have a high value in global biological importance, but where compensation payments are still lower. SAFE has launched the first ever Biorights project in India at East Kolkata Wetlands. Come….. Evolve with us…Service to His creation is service to mankind.

Jai Hind!!