Sunday, December 29, 2013

Cost of Urbanisation



Had there been water scarcity several decades ago, Mongar-pas won’t have settled in middle of inclined mountain. Sharchokpa, the indigenous inhabitants of eastern Bhutan who are generally considered to be naïve and innocent by virtue were deprived of modern facilities until the inception of mega projects like Kurichu Hydro-power Project Cooperation (KHPC) and majestic Mongar Regional Referral Hospital.
Urbanisation is marked by the construction of several storeyed concrete buildings which overshadowed colourful conventional architectures that once dominated the hamlet town. With the booming business people from different parts of the country tend to encroach the town that was once hardly known to business tycoons.
Unlike, rest of the urban areas, residents of the Mongar town tend to speak versatile sharchopkha (local eastern dialect) despite one’s cultural background. Its unavoidable fact that Mongar is comparatively fastest growing town among rest of the Eastern districts with variety of people from every nook and corner of the nation residing either as employee or businessmen but there seems to be little impact of urbanisation in terms of culture. For a first time visitors, seldom it’s surprising to witness an expatriate fluently conversing in local dialect.
Energy which is literally said that it can be neither created nor destroyed but can be changed from one form to another is the core driver of an urbanisation or a human civilization. It is dependent on the availability of resources, which seems to be unsustainable in the face of rapid urbanisation.  People tend to consume more resources with change in life style along with increase in population concentrated in a pocket of the urban area. Attracted by better opportunities, increased in the number of rural people moving towards the urban area seems to be unavoidable fueling most discussed issue of rural urban migration. So does Monggar town is not exempted from such fate.  
Yakpogang stream
Not more than a decade ago, Yakpogang stream was known for its ferocity during the monsoon and a cascade flow during the winter. Huge area of terrace located near the enclave of Research Centre Wengkhar, presently left fallow due to the shortage of irrigation water was considered to be once a fertile land irrigated by then a furious stream. The same stream is also being used as a source of drinking water by the residents of the town. At current scenario, whenever there is a heavy downpour, stream tends to swell creating hope in the people but lasting not more than an hour or two.  Looking back to the situation, not more than a decade ago a local resident of Yakpogang has a different story to be unfolded. Primarily, they attribute the shrinkage of water volume discharge from the same Yakpogang stream to massive timber extraction from the catchment area to meet the demand of developmental activities in Monggar town.    
Easygoing nature of Bhutanese with narrow vision, when it comes to usage of natural resources tend to possess major threat leading to sustainability in question. With the very late exposure to modern civilization, Bhutanese people never had to face the problem of natural resource crisis as it has been very little explored by our forefathers. But scenario is changing with accessibility of Bhutanese to very high tech sophisticated way of exploring the resources to bridge the gap of rapid developmental activities.

Stone chips crushing plant
Similarly, Construction and Development Co-operation limited  (CDCL) came up with the stone chips crushing plant at Kilikhar to serve the immediate need of stone chips for developmental activities like a road, without which developmental works will be stagnant.  Although such plants are unavoidable, they have to go through certain set of bureaucratic approval for its establishment to minimize its negative impact to both social and environment. Being a young responsible citizen and an environmentalist, it’s little bit surprising to see that the aforementioned plant is established with destruction of potential drinking water sources from where  people still tend to harness water that is being polluted by the plant due to acute water shortage in the town.
As said “better late than never”, with the outcry of the town residents over acute drinking water shortage, policy maker has come up with the idea of first ever  Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) scheme by declaring once overexploited forest of Yakpogang as a Community Forest (CF) to address the issue. Hopefully scheme is working successfully with visible improvement in forest condition. 
But the issue doesn’t subside here; there is a need to explore more reliable and immediate solutions to the problem.

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