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Interview

Scientific Approach Works Better than Emotions in Winning Support for Public Causes: Ramsar Awardee Jayshree Vencatesan

The world’s wetlands play multiple crucial but unrecognised roles – protecting biodiversity and flood control, to name but two. However, despite the 1971-Ramsar Convention, which provided the framework to conserve wetlands, there has been a gradual loss of global wetlands to activities such as urbanisation, agriculture or pollution. India is no different: Some estimates suggest that about 65 per cent of its wetlands might have been lost. It became a party to the Ramsar Convention in 1982 and has since brought 89 wetlands under the protected area framework. The National Wetland Atlas 2024, published by the Space Applications Centre of ISRO, states that India has a total of 16.89 million hectares of wetland area – including river but excludes paddy field areas – which works to about 5.12 per cent of the country’s geographical area.

Conservation of wetlands received a boost after conservationists adopted a scientific approach and established legal frameworks over the past two decades. In Chennai, the Pallikaranai Marsh, a 1,247-hectare freshwater marsh and partly saline wetland, became the symbol of this movement. Dr. Jayshree Vencatesan, co-founder and Managing Trustee of Care Earth Trust, and Dr. Ranjith Daniels, co-founder of CET, using basic tools, carried out the first biodiversity assessment of the marshland, with support from the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, which also helped them take the message far and wide. In an interview with Saptarshi Bhattacharya, Senior Coordinator, The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Dr. Vencatesan, a recipient of this year’s Ramsar Award for Wise Use of Wetlands, one of the 12 women globally recognised for their work in wetland conservation, traces her journey and the various learning curves that she had to negotiate. “Every research that happens in this world is public funded. It’s your responsibility to give it back to people,” she emphasised. Excerpts:

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India’s plural tradition, safeguarded by a constitutional commitment to a secular democracy, is going through challenging times. The founding ideals of a multi-religious, inclusive Indian nation are fast being reshaped by a majoritarian formulation of the normative relationship between the state and religion.

Rajeev Bhargava, Honorary Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and Balliol College, Oxford, and Director, Parekh Institute of Indian Thought, CSDS, analyses what went wrong with India’s tryst with a sui generis form of secularism. In conversation with V.S. Sambandan, Chief Administrative Officer, The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, he draws out the differences between the European and Indian variants, and the lessons offered by the latter; how ‘modernity’ resulted in ‘religionisation’, which, in turn, displaced India’s plural, free-flowing pathways; and the points of inflexion in the practice of secularism in India. He also flags an important missing element: the omission of caste from the secularisation process. Equating the Indian caste hierarchy with the “meddlesome” church in western societies, he asserts: “A caste system thwarting individual autonomy and one caste dominating another caste within the Hindu order has to be fought.”

As for the trajectory that lies ahead for India’s engagement with secularism, Prof. Bhargava remains optimistic but with a caveat: Although the “downward trajectory will stop”, one cannot expect “a dramatic turnaround”. This assessment arises from his reading that India’s disengagement from the constitutional ideal commenced in the 1980s, and, therefore, “the recovery will also take a longer period. But it will take place.”

Edited excerpts from an interview held in Chennai on August 18, 2023:

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