Pahalgam July 24,2017: The Municipal committee of Pahalgam needs to ensure proper cleanliness in Pahalgam. The main market is being cleaned but the villages need to be cleaned too. There are heaps of polythene and garbage lying around and the circuit road, particularly from Sarbal to Laripora Panchayat needs to be cleaned.
Mushtaq Pahalgami,
Himalayan Welfare Organization-HWO
Pahalgam July 24,2017: Although there are more than 300 or above employees at the Municipal Committee Pahalgam, most do not report for duty and are instead offering their services at the homes of some Ex MCP officers or in establishments of some poltacians. This is so for most wings except office wing sanitation, khalfwarzi and the tax wing, and we urge Director Urban Local bodies to take strict and immediate note of the matter. All such people must be thrown out immediately and the hard eraned tax money of the people of Pahalgam that is being used to pay their salaries should instead be spent on due development of Pahalgam.
Mushtaq Pahalgami,
Himalayan Welfare Organization-HWO
Need and importance of afforestation?
Definition of afforestation:
Afforestation is the process of establishing a forest on land where there is no forest, by planting trees or sowing their seeds and caring continually until the trees grow collectively as a whole into a forest as planned.
Need and importance of afforestation:
Afforestation helps in addressing the environmental issues of the world, esp. in preventing further global warming and reversing the effects of global warming. It also helps in avoiding desertification.
As the human needs grew by the population growth and advances in civilization people have been exploiting nature and converting forests into agricultural lands, mines, and industrial areas for various resources for their recreation, enjoyment and comfort in living.
As the global environmental issues due toindustrialization are growing more seriously, there is an urgent need for the mankind to resolve them by protecting the environment by way of afforestation.
The afforestation in and around an industrial region serves in aesthetically enhancing the foreground and background landscape features while contributing to the overall improvement of the environment.
Forests have many important and varied functions, and to have a broad idea some of them are listed below:
.Forests are the renewable resource of nature.
.They are giant sinks of carbon: they absorb and assimilate carbon dioxide, which accounts for the majority of the greenhouse gases that are now accelerating global warming.
.They are home to living creatures,
.They contribute in maintaining biodiversity
.They regulate the climate
.They provide industrial timber and fuel,
.They prevent and mitigate sudden freshets that lead to flooding Forests are fundamentally essential in
.preservation of natural lands against soil run-off and erosion resulting in retention of fertility of the soil
.conservation of water resources,
.creating a healthy atmosphere for health of humans and other beings,
.evolution of culture and civilization
.providing research opportunities in education and learning
When we compare forest with non-forest areas within a single region, we find that forest areas are generally higher in humidity and milder in temperature.Water released from forest areas enters the sea and nurtures a wide variety of life forms naturally.
Afforestation is a proven method which contributes to environmental conservation, less polluted industrial development and healthy community activation.
Source:Other
Courtesy :Himalayan Welfare Organization-HWO
Pahalgam July 23,2017: Somebody had dumped old matresses and mattress stuffing etc in forest area in Kms 03 pahalgam circuit road near PWD hut and I had intimated the concerned department about it yesterday itself today this trash was set to fire by someone , causing much avoidable air polltuion, as can be seen in the pics.
Switch Bharat Abhiyan SBA
Mushtaq Pahalgami
Himalayan Welfare Organization-HWO
Pahalgam July 23,2017: Everybody says the local environment at Gulmarg, Sonamarg and Pahalgam is being destroyed by pony walas, nomad gujjars and other local people. This could be partly true too as links between environment and poverty are well established now, these people are poor and backward and are not very highly educated so it is perhaps even obvious that they know only traditional living practises and don't know about sustainability etc.
However nobody asks about pollution caused by the lifestyle choices and daily living practises of the educated city dwellers of cities/towns like Srinagar,Ananthnag,Budgam, Baramulla,Ganderbal,Bij hera.....where perfectly well educated people choose to dump garbage irresponsibly, dont hesitate in polluting water bodies and have encroached upon banks and catchment areas, incliding in Dal lake,Jehlum,Sindh and other flood channels and canal area .. which actually caused much of the human disaster in 2014.
It is easy to pose questions to the weak and poor and hold them responsible for all problems, but difficult to practise what we preach.
Unfortunately today those people are trying to teach us lessons in environmental conservation who have themselves never practised what they are preaching. We Himalayan Welfare Organization-HWO and Pahalgam Peoples Welfare Organisation-PPWO on the other hand, have continuosly faught for the pahalgam masterplan and got the Environment Impact Assessment EIA and expert committe report done for pahalgam and it's surroundings .
Finally, even as there may be a need to educate and sensitize the poor of the risks and dangers of environmentally hazardous lifestyle practices, it is the choices made by the rich and the redponsibilty evaded by those in power that causes large scale damage to the environment.
And so, for those who enjoy preaching others about the ordinary citizen's rile and duty .. one last word of advice, passing the blame onto others won't help solve the problem. It will only tell about their real intensions and expose their vested designs!
Mushtaq Pahalgami,
Himalayan Welfare Organization-HWO
The Himalayas must be protected
Climate change and human activities are pushing the fragile ecosystem ever closer to instability, warns .
Maharaj K. Pandit.
18 September 2013
As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gets ready to publish the first instalment of its latest report, many critics of the reports have been harking back to the previous effort — and the glaring mistake it made in stating that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.
The situation in the Himalayas is not as dire as that, but it is certainly perilous. And although the IPCC overstated the timescale, the threat to the mountains from global warming and other pressures is genuine and must be addressed. Just this summer, the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand witnessed what many described as the most horrific devastation in human memory. Cloudbursts, flash floods, landslides, human deaths and destruction were unleashed within a day. Human casualties were put in the thousands, and estimates of economic loss range from US$500 million to around $2 billion. Similarly, a monsoon flood hit Pakistan in 2010, killing more than 2,000 people, displacing millions and costing $40 billion.
Policy-makers in India and elsewhere are reluctant to accept a glaring and dangerous truth: combined human activities have stressed the Himalayas close to their limit. We need positive action, not least a restriction on the number of tourists who visit during the monsoon season from June to September. Too many of them are unaware of the risks they run. Thousands of visitors perished in the Uttarakhand disaster. Policy-makers must actively engage with scientists and experts on the problems facing the Himalayas and their people to make sustainable development work.
Global warming can grab the headlines, but many of the other pressures on the fragile mountain region are more mundane. The human population is increasing fast in the Himalayas, and so is the speed of the landscape changes needed to support it. Cattle grazing and rampant deforestation — on current trends, one-third of the total Indian Himalayan forest cover could be gone by 2100 — will drive nearly one-quarter of endemic species to extinction and disrupt the natural flow of water. A changed Himalayan landscape caused by human activities and warming means transformed natural ecosystems through biological invasions and reduced native biodiversity.
People need energy, and in the Himalayas that means hydropower and dams. Nearly 400 new dams are proposed for the Indian and Tibetan Himalayas in the next decade or so. With them will come more change to ecosystems and more people displaced from submerged settlements. Such rampant dam-building in a region with high seismic activity and fragile geology shows that the policy-makers who approve these schemes either do not understand the scientific evidence or choose to ignore it.
The Himalayas are just 45 million years (Myr) old — mere striplings compared with the Aravallis in India (around 4,000 Myr old) and the North American Appalachians (440–480 Myr). Young, folded and still rising, the Himalayas are more tectonically active than most mountains.
Rising temperatures add to the problems. Melting ice and snow form new glacial lakes, as well as increasing the volumes of existing ones. This could raise the threat of glacial-lake outburst floods. Some 8,800 glacial lakes in the Himalayas are spread across nations, and more than 200 of these have been classified as dangerous. Recent scientific evidence suggests that floods originating in the Himalayas are caused largely by landslides that temporarily block mountain rivers.
The Himalayas are warming faster than other mountain ranges, and the increased use of reinforced concrete in building construction, replacing the traditional wood and stone masonry there, is likely to create a heat-island effect and thus add to regional warming.
“Himalayan countries need to build an international network to monitor risks.
What is the way forward in the Himalayas? Clearly, the social and economic development of the Himalayan population cannot be undermined — literacy levels and school enrolment are up and infant mortality is down. Still, these are the same people who will suffer from the region’s growing ecological degradation and environmental instability. Numerous regulations that should protect them, on mining and flood-plain development, for example, are poorly or rarely enforced. Indeed, many in India blame environmental regulations for the current economic downturn. An environmental tax on tourists to restrict numbers and raise funds would be equally unpopular, but the idea deserves proper discussion.
Most urgently, Himalayan countries need to build an international network that will monitor risks such as those from glacial lakes, and give early warning of hazards — similar to the tsunami warning systems installed around the Indian Ocean over the past decade. Scientists and engineers must make the case more forcefully that rampant building construction cannot be permitted on riverbanks or flood plains that are constantly swept by monsoon floods.
If the people of the Himalayas were more aware of the geological vulnerability and ecological fragility of their mountain home, they would surely force more compliance of laws and regulations to protect it. India and other affected countries should include in their school curricula basic knowledge of the geology and ecology of the Himalayas. If students are taught about their environment, they will feel more connected to the land and be more aware of its pulse.
Pahalgam July 19,2017: Though the Shrine board is doing a some satisfactory job of maintaining cleanliness in the yatra camp at Nunwanan Pahalgam , the sewage water that is discharged form toilets baths and langars in the camps into the river Lidder stinks like hell and is literally poison for local aquatic life. The stench form this water is so strong and insufferable that one cannot even stand near the STP outlet near Nunwanan Pahalgam for 5 minutes. The situation is even worse at other camp sites like Chandanwari,Sheshnag,Poshpatri,Panjtarni,Holycave and Baltal. The board is spending a considerable amount on constructions etc but no attention is being paid to sanitation and other sensitive issues. The negligence however, is causing much damage to glaciers and local ecology, including the shiv lingam itself. The issue commands urgent attention and needs to be addressed with sincerity and commitment, before it's too late in the face of permanent and irreversible damage to the glacier region's sensitive ecology.
Mushtaq PahalgamI
Himalayan Welfare Organization-HWO
