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.
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| Yakpogang stream |
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.
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| Stone chips crushing plant |
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.
