Kuldip Maity

When Chennai needed rescue trains laden with water during its recent water crisis we sat up and took notice. But public memory is short and we tend to quickly turn such crisis to a topic of mere reference in ‘chai pe charcha’. But there are nations who are taking note – especially the ones who are in dire straits with a perennially short supply of freshwater. To Israel, for example, water is part of its security issue. To Australia, during its millennium drought (1997-2009), it meant searching for a price solution to the water crisis. The Australian solution is now being referred to as a model to follow globally.

Let us now turn to a few facts. According to environmental assessments, by 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people will live in water-scarce areas. More importantly, by that time two-third of the world population will live in water-stressed areas. And according to NASA, we are depleting freshwater faster than the ability of nature to replenish it.

Scientists, therefore, are turning to ways of processing seawater into freshwater supplies given the fact that 97.5 per cent of the water available on the earth is accounted for by the seas and currently unfit for human consumption. But that again will have an environmental impact as it would require a bump in the energy consumption. Anything that we do to raise our energy consumption will add to the carbon footprint that in turn will lead to enhanced global warming.

The civilization is already caught in a vicious cycle of the environmental crisis of destructive proportion. Take, for example, the fact that glaciers and ice caps are depositories of global freshwater supply. Sixty-eight per cent of the global freshwater comes from the ice caps and glaciers. Due to global warming, they are melting fast depleting the freshwater reservoir of the world.

If we take into account agriculture, source of our food supply, that accounts for seventy per cent freshwater consumption we can see a disaster unfolding. Most of the water used by agriculture is pumped either from underground or from irrigation facilities sourced from rivers by interfering with their natural flow. That, in turn, interferes with the underground natural way of water recharge.

In India, the Ganga basin’s ability to recharge is depleting fast due to the increasing need for irrigation with the Ganga an important source of Agri water needs. Add to that an increase in population leading to higher demand for food and consequently increased demand for energy to pump water and the entire disaster dynamics become clear.

The issue at stake here is for us to realize that nature doesn’t work in isolation. While rains are needed for us to survive, the excessive and irregular occurrence of events like floods works negatively. Incessant floods destroy topsoil and reduce the earth’s ability to sponge water and recharge aquifers robbing us of freshwater supply. Greater carbon footprint is creating global warming that in turn is melting the glaciers and ice caps – our repository of freshwater.

Think of going through a day without water and then imagine earth dry of freshwater supply – it sounds ominous. Doesn’t it? Therefore the time has come for us to think seriously about survival. If we don’t take notice even now, we will sign the death sentence of our entire race!

The statement that AI is a threat is attributed to Jack Ma – the Chinese IT billionaire who is arguably the richest person walking the earth. His statement is interpreted to have implied that it would take away a lot of jobs. But will it? Then there is the issue of remotely controlled or self-run intelligent war machines. This part, however, may turn into reality even faster.

Let us first look into the aspect of AI as a job killer. Historically, at every stage of evolution of automation, the fear of the negative impact on the masses has also found a voice. The more recent incident that is still etched in our memory is the issue of computerization in banking operations. Then, the whole programme got stalled due to the massive opposition from the employee unions.

With the computerization, however, there has been greater absorption of employees due to the expansion of branches and business. However, it is also true that computerization and AI are not exactly the same thing. AI involves adaptive learning by machines. The fear that is doing the round is whether a day will come when artificial intelligence will supersede human intelligence. The readers who have seen Stanley Kubick’s Space Odyssey based on Arthur C Clark’s Sentinel will know what is being said here. In the film, the space ship carrying deep space explorers will take overall controls fearing reversal of the mandated mission. It’s a grim story but, nonetheless, remains a point of reference to the detractors of AI.

The point that is at stake immediately, however, is the issue of humanless war machines that will run on AI. This is a grim picture as the machines will not have emotions and will be senseless intelligent killing robots. With the world increasingly turning more and more violent this issue indeed remains a matter of serious concern, At this point, one is reminded of Isaac Asimov, the seminal science fiction writer and a noted student of science. He created the idea of three laws of robotics.

First Law
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

The basic issue for Asimov was to create a set of principles for robotics to cover for the time when the population of robots increase to such an extent that it may overwhelm the humanity. So he thought up this law and later added another that said that robots will self destruct once they face a conflict between the laws.

But that’s in the realm of fiction. What at this stage of development and the information that is understandable for us in the non-scientific community is that an improvement in the machine operations will lead to higher productivity. However, at the same time, we are facing the danger of senseless exploitation of the same in warfare by the technologically advanced nation. This may also create a more unequal distribution of wealth. We should together apply our mind not to halt the progress of science but to avert the possible negative fall out of the same.

In my last blog, I expressed my concern about the global environmental crisis. Deforestation is, unfortunately, an androgenic cause of the impending disaster that is staring at our face.

In the beginning, it must be admitted that the actual quantification of the carbon footprint resulting from deforestation is still in the realm of approximation. But the scientific reasons behind the contribution of forests in carbon sequestering are proved beyond doubt. There is also no doubt about the extent to which trees contribute to the prevention of soil erosion – another significant cause that acts as a decelerating cause behind growth of trees. Regeneration of environment is well documented and scientifically validated.

Though some policymakers of influential nations or those nations harbouring natural real estate crucially determining the earth’s environment have started to take a different view, global warming is no longer an issue in dispute. Take for example the case of the Amazon forest. Recently, it has been reported that the gold miners have gone and killed the leaders of an Amazon tribe because they were prevented from prospecting within the habitat of the tribe concerned. The prospectors were destroying the environment that was crucial to the livelihood of the tribal.

The Guardian recently reported that the Amazon’s pristine jungle was being destroyed every day at a clearance rate equivalent to a Manhattan island. If we remember that the jungle of Amazon is known as the lung of the world it doesn’t take us long to realize the crisis we are facing.

Trees breathe out oxygen and breathe in carbon dioxide. So all the carbons that our civilization emits get naturally filtered by the trees. It doesn’t take a huge intellect to understand that if we destroy forest we will destroy the natural filter of carbon that’s inimical to our survival. We can’t breathe carbon and if the environment gets carbon-heavy we are doomed.

It just doesn’t stop here. Trees are natural dams against flood and soil erosion. It leads to the earth’s inability to hold water and therefore flooding. With the topsoil gone, the rain tends to wash sediments into rivers thereby clogging up streams of rivers – a situation that is significantly responsible for a rise in the rates of flooding being witnessed globally. In Madagascar, the rivers run red due to soil erosion.

Deforestation, or destruction of tree cover, has a feedback loop on the availability of food for human consumption as well. It not only destroys biodiversity, but it also takes away soil fertility as well forcing us to use more chemical fertilisers and pesticides – known to have greatly contributed to the rise in various types of diseases, including cancer – or even forcing us to claim more forest land. You take away some and then you are forced to take away more and then more of it. In the process, we kill ourselves a little and then more of us and then, ultimately, all of us. The planet will live on without us, but we will not live without the Nature we were born into.

A few weeks ago the Australian Koala Foundation declared the Koala bear as functionally extinct. With just about 80,000 left, there is not enough adult left to propagate the species. The news got wide coverage in media, but unfortunately, little notice was taken of it. The other news about the emergence of a lake on the Alps became just a matter of curiosity. But the panic button got pressed when Chennai went dry of potable water.

The crisis that has befallen us across the globe is entirely anthropogenic or, in other words, the creation of man. Why are Koalas facing extinction? Because relentless urbanisation and commercial exploitation of nature have destroyed the habitat of the Australian marsupial which essentially means that we have mindlessly destroyed natural resource that was meant to sustain us.

This story is getting repeated across the width and breadth of the globe leading to a precipitous decline of biodiversity. Unfortunately, we do not understand the meaning of an impending crisis, unless the crisis knocks on our door. The world is losing 2.6 trillion US dollar in GDP – about India’s GDP – every year because of pollution. This is happening because of sick days, medical bills and reduced agricultural outputs. By 2060 the number of pre-matured death resulting from environmental destruction is feared to exceed 9 million.

In order to rush towards more and more prosperity, we are destroying the nature that sustains the natural cycle. The USA has not only opted out of the Global conference on pollution, rubbing salt on the pollution wounds it has decided to ease environmental curbs on fossil fuels like coal mining. It has also allowed oil pipelines to be laid across a pristine area in Alaska that was considered absolutely a sacrosanct patch in the bible of environment protection.

The causes of global warming that is leading to the changes in the weather cycle are entirely our doing. The entire natural cycle is about interdependence. Trees are natural carbon sync. As we cut them down and exploit more and more fossil fuel we create rising carbon footprints that in turn lead to global warming.

What does global warming do to us? It starts by killing the weather that we are used to. Europe is getting warmer and Bengal is missing its rainy season while western India is getting swept by heavy rains. The sea level is rising and devastating storms are creating havocs more frequently than mankind had ever known. The sea level is rising threatening to inundate large chunks of land. Polar glaciers have started melting that may ultimately lead to the total extinction of polar bears and Eskimos trying to survive in higher temperature.

The economic crisis is the more imminent one. The so-called agricultural belt of the world is now threatened with lower production and land productivity because of drying up of rivers and underground water resource. The rise in temperature is also unleashing chronic diseases across species, including us the human being.

Nations in which poverty is chronic will suffer the most. From firewood to shelter, they are heavily dependent on nature. Should the weather changes their challenge to survive will be the most. With the agriculture belt nursing the maximum number of poor, it doesn’t take a huge intellect to understand the crisis. The inter-governmental panel on climate change (IPCC), 2018, has warned that we just have 12 years to reverse climate change. After that, it will be too late to do anything about it and it is feared that it will put the existence of even our race tenuous.

Its time, we care….

While grappling with the challenge of alleviating poverty, development economists have gone through the whole spectrum of conceivable instruments that could be feasibly thought of without triggering a disruption. By the seventies, however, the strain of financing poverty alleviation started to tell heavily on the government resources. Keeping in mind the fact that the nations that suffered the most from the ills of poverty were themselves poor, it was an expected outcome. It was so because most of the instruments depended upon were like doles, e.g. subsidies.

Problem with such dole dependent system is that it tends not to create capacities. Take for example the case of subsidies. Its larger application is found in food. By subsidizing food prices the government concerned tries to make it suit the pockets of the poor. The problem here is that though it takes some care of the problem of hunger, it squarely fails to create capacity and surplus that is needed to bring the poor out of their poverty.

Although the search had been going on for some time for a sustainable solution none really clicked. Then Muhammad Younus, who later won the Nobel prize for his contribution, found a possible answer in microfinance. He started experimenting with microloans for capacity creation. With his experiment, empowerment became the keyword in the fight against poverty.

As the microfinance started to deliver results, microfinance institutions as social enterprise began to spread. It slowly became apparent that it was a win-win situation for all. The microfinance institutions (MFIs) were given the right to claim a spread on the interest thereby allowing it to cover the cost and make a profit and grow.

On the other hand, the compulsion of ensuring that the customers returned the loan with interest made the MFIs hold hands of the borrowers so that they put the funds to productive use. It indeed was an interesting development. The MFIs, in search of raising profits – a commercial motive, kept expanding their operations, and with their spread more and more people started benefiting from the expansion which is the ultimate goal. This was the efficiency argument that the development pundits were looking for.

The MFIs, whatever may their regulatory structure be, are in essence financial instrument delivery organisations. As such, therefore, they need strict regulatory oversight so that they do not turn usurious and defeat the purpose for which they are set up. In 2011, the Reserve Bank of India sub-committee set up to address the issues related to MFIs submitted its report. This report defined the roadmap for the MFIs.

The microfinance operations, thus defined, created a legally endorsed framework for capacity creation that married commercial motive with social welfare. Commercial motive for the microfinance institutions and economic empowerment – social welfare – for the masses.