Natural engineering: India's green infrastructure

 From economists, development gurus, and politicians, this is a common refrain: infrastructure development needs due emphasis and allocation to achieve growth and abolish poverty.

Yet, a simple question comes to mind: what is India’s infrastructure, really? Take a look at a brochure or website of any company that peddles infrastructure. High on the list will be dams and hydropower, roads and bridges, and energy. In the last national Economic Survey, railways, ports, and communication were included. These are meant to represent infrastructure, the backbone industry that ostensibly needs to enable India to stand proud in the developing world. But pause for a moment and humour this tangential interpretation.

Assume for a start, not unreasonably, that sectors such as agriculture and fisheries, forests and public health are at least as important as industry and services. What kind of infrastructure enables and supports the flow of goods and services in these sectors?
Imagine an infrastructural edifice built thousands of feet high, able to snatch the moisture out of the atmosphere and funnel it down for our use, clear as crystal. Stretch this for hundreds of kilometres to benefit millions-think of the Western Ghats, and the Himalaya.

Imagine marine infrastructure with components hard as concrete and pliable as reed, structured and self-renewing, guarding beaches and fringing islands-our densely populated and productive areas-from the incessant battering of the sea. Ring it around islands, fish-filled lagoons, and bays to fuel the prosperity of coastal communities. Think coral reef and mangrove, coastal dunes and seagrasses.

Think of a giant reservoir, built without dams and concrete, holding not water but dynamic snow and ice, safeguarding irrigation and drinking needs for centuries. Freeze it in the cold weather, melt it down for the dry summer. Think of thousands of glaciers on the Himalayan peaks.

There is other ingenious infrastructure-a substance spread over vast areas, porous and friable, inches to feet in depth, with the right ingredients of nutriment and water retention to support productive crops. Soil. A self-repairing giant sponge capturing water over thousands of square kilometres and releasing it, measured and pure. Forests. An immense water-network, linking peoples, quenching thirst, and sharing its fertility through flood-carried silt and aquatic life. Rivers.

If by infrastructure is meant that which builds the structural foundation of our country, then this is the infrastructure that we must revive and guard-our mountains and rivers, forests and grasslands, reefs and mangroves, soil and air. These are the real bedrock of the nation, its fibre and substance.

What happens, then, to our roads and railways, ships and powerlines? One could argue for an attitudinal frame-shift, where we see these not as the foundations of India’s development, but as superstructures built over our natural infrastructure, which temporarily moderate and regulate our passage through these lands and waters. We live presently in the blink of a geological eye; alone among all creatures we can perceive this and look far ahead, but do we?

Assault

And yet, the superstructures and the activities that go with them are not gentle on our lands and waters; they whittle away at the natural foundation at alarming rates.

Logging, industry, and mining tear away at our last forests, leaving only sorry vestiges and artificial ‘compensatory’ replacements. Roads, rails, powerlines, and pipelines thoughtlessly sunder habitats and cleave forests and wetlands, bringing fire and fragmentation, alien weeds and desiccation. Roads in hilly terrain are known to increase rates of soil loss through erosion and landslides over 10-fold compared to retaining undisturbed forests. In the Himalaya, glaciers continue to melt and retreat due to climate change, endangering lives, livelihoods, agriculture, and ecosystems. Droughts bite into human lives and GDP and we believe water security will arrive through motors and metal pipes. Dams continue to submerge thousands of square kilometres of forests, degrade more in the surrounding watersheds, destabilise hill slopes and eat sediments in their life of brief, concrete bloom and extended, muddy decline. Unrepentant, unconcerned even, we build more.

The very surface and stability of our natural infrastructure erodes daily. It must be said: the superstructures that penetrate them and burgeon like cancers are responsible. Our built capital runs rough-shod over our natural capital.

Yet, conservation, as Aldo Leopold put it, is not just about restraint; there is need for skill. Can the skill of engineering, which has taken us to outer space, be combined with that of ecology, which has helped us understand the dynamics of ecosystems? Will engineers now, through field training and textbooks, learn ecology, while ecologists strive to grasp the contours of engineering?

It is possible that ecologists and engineers, working together, could develop a more sensitive and salutary approach. One that replaces detrimental intervention emphasising heavy machinery and concrete with more skillfully designed and deployed invention, placed in ways that respects, and sits gently, on our lands and waters. If such a collaborative skill can be nurtured, tempered by a humility learned from history and geology and the marvel of evolution, perhaps our mark on the landscape may be permanent, and yet propitious.

(The author works for Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore)