For ironies, the just-concluded World Summit For Sustainable Development at Johannesburg was big. All this talk of poverty alleviation and sustainable development amidst that enormous fleet of Mercedes Benz limos standing by to ferry the ‘talkers’ in the style they expect would be enough, possibly, to blow another hole in the ozone layer! As in Rio, the wrangling between the North and South continued with 13 important sticking points emerging in the 71-page ‘Plan of Implementation’ and the US holding back on commitments to cut down on its carbon emissions within a timeframe. Yet an event that brought together some 100 world leaders — with the conspicuous exception of George Bush and our own Atal Bihari Vajpayee — an estimated 21,000 official delegates and some 60,000 non-governmental representatives must surely yield some insights, some best practices, some norms of life on how we, in this country, could manage our own natural resources and lifestyles.To take just one theme, the renewed and very welcome emphasis on managing water at the Summit is something we would do well to emulate in our own policy-making. We know the global statistics, that the world’s population has tripled in the 20th century leading to a six-fold increase in water use and that 1.1 billion lack access to clean drinking water. At Johannesburg, managing water and ensuring that it reaches people was identified as one of humanity’s most critical challenges. The trick, it seems, is in first understanding how much water is available, who was using it and for what purpose. At the global scale, the three largest users were the agricultural sector which consumes something like 67 per cent of reserves; industry, which uses 19 per cent and the municipal and residential sector which accounts for 9 per cent.It is also useful to remember the link between water and sanitation. As was observed at the Summit, water was life but sanitation was a way of life. This country has paid dearly for not having sufficiently bothered about this simple but obvious truth in terms of the unconscionably high level of infant deaths due to water-borne infections. The only way out, it seems, is to activate local communities into managing their own water and sanitation requirements to supplement government action on this score. If Johannesburg can prompt a rethink in national priorities even in the handling of this one resource, it would have served a purpose. The minister of environment and forests is back from his South African sojourn, so too Yashwant Sinha, our peripatetic union minister of external affairs. Will they now like to share with us some of the wisdom they gleaned on foreign shores, and better still institute them in national policy?
