Vision of Life; by Sanjay: Environment Enggineering, Town Planning & Tigers of Tadoba @ CoEP !!

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” … Abraham Lincoln

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed… William Gibson

While most of my readers knows about the author of the first quote yet there are few for them, Abraham Lincoln is a name for USA which on scale of comparison can be described as what Gandhiji is for our country & a lot more than that as a human being & as a leader, for world’s greatest country, is what USA considers themselves! William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as Cyberpunk, which a story driven online game too, open world RPG of the dark future from CD PROJEKT RED, creators of The Witcher series of games. Though Lincoln’s quote uses destruction of the trees but take it as just an analogy as what he meant is importance of preparing for the task which we call as planning & that’s why I used this quote as the subject is about planning & felt that the wise words of Lincoln will be the best start! I have been invited (read as honoured) to address Post Grad Students of CoEP i.e., Govt College of Eng Pune, one of the most respected Eng education institutes in the country & to my delight Dr Pratap Raval who is dean of planning dept was generous enough to allow me to choose the subject by myself for the lecture! It’s a boon as well as a challenge too, as I chose “Environment Eng., Town Planning & Tigers of Tadoba” as my subject, which he agreed along with his colleague Dr Isha Panse, that’s real courage I must say!

By now I can call myself a veteran speaker (self-proclaimed) as stage-daring is no more an issue of concern for me yet this time I was having goose-bumps before lecture as this was not some general audience & the place of lecture was where I myself couldn’t get admission to this Master’s course in this very institute some thirty years back so the invite was like life coming to full circle & I needed to be at my best, for my own pride(or ego)! And that’s why I thought of choosing something which won’t be part of their syllabus as well a turf to which these students are not much exposed to, which will be to my advantage (lol) but more than that to share something which no school or college or books has taught them till now & that is, using wildlife to understand their responsibilities about planning aspect of life ahead! And, I started with the announcement that many of you must have been intrigued with the title of my sharing which looks like some film by Anurag Kashyap (please google about him) but that’s how I have understood planning by being in the wildlife! First aspect of planning is, to understand the purpose for what you are planning & that why it’s important to visit places like tadoba which is exceptionally successful on the planning front as while in the entire world’s tiger population is decreasing in tadoba its increasing & that wasn’t possible without planning, this is why I chose tadoba as case study for planning lecture! I explained to these students about tigers, things like core area & buffer & people in & around tadoba & why it’s a success & how its done & what are the challenges ahead now & this “journey ahead,” is the cause of my sharing with them!

I showed them many wonderful wildlife images from tadoba but later I showed them hardships of that life & what help people over there need too. I then showed many images about disturbance caused in the lives of wild species due to human intervention (read as encroachment) as Urban Planning or Town Planning unfortunately has been made by the humans for the humans only thing & may be some decades back that was needed as the humans were a developing species but now when we have developed (supposedly) then it's high-time, we should accommodate other species also in our planning. Because, “what we plan for we usually end up creating,” is a popular psychological phrase; for e.g. you plan for cars & you end up making more flyovers, you plan for criminals & you end up making more jails & right in our home also if we plan for more storage spaces then we end up collecting more unwanted stuff (all sort of it). On the similar lines, till we are planning for town (read as humans) we will keep destroying other species or just won’t think about their needs, is the real challenge in-front of them when they will be starting their career as town planners! And this is why we must consider or keep focus of our planning with a vision inclusive of all the species as then only we will be able to create spaces for them. Why this aspect is important is because on one side if numbers of tigers has increased in Tadoba (read as Chandrapur) then number of deaths of the tigers also has reached an all time high & outcome is, the country has lost nearly 200 tigers in the year 2023. Ways of these tiger’s deaths may be many yet the basic reason behind all these deaths is the same i.e. space reduction for the tigers which indirectly means reduction of forest cover or loss of habitat & this is not failure of the forest dept but of our planning ability as a system! And if you think what’s big deal in the death of 200 tigers, then take a look on this analogy; we are 150 crore humans in our country where as there are 3750 tigers in our country so one tiger represents nearly 3,75,000 humans & death of 200 tigers in a year means death of nearly seven & half crore humans in a year, now you can imagine the seriousness of these figures! You may say I am mad or this is absurd but naming me anything won’t change the fact that we have failed to plan a world which will make every species have its own space to survive & prosper but as we have focused only the humans as our object of planning, we are killing other species because we plan only for the needs of the humans. Actually, here also we are a failure because if you look at the growth as per region (of-course of the humans only) then barring Mumbai-Nashik-Pune triangle rest most of the Maharashtra has been prospered only in some pockets & the migration is rampant toward this triangle, making infrastructure fronts like water & traffic collapse in these cities as well housing has become a major concern here. But in all other parts of the State real estate is not doing that well as people have to migrate for their career or comfort, this is a direct outcome of failure of planning which we call policies & this also is a challenge in-front of them, is what I shared.

This migration of humans towards only one particular region creates problems for the humans in that particular region at the same time it makes damage to the sustainability of the life in the regions from where migration is happening so it’s a two-way damage when we fail to plan the cities of the regions or say fail to understand basic purpose of the planning. And on the front as Gibson’s quote says, the failure is already here the way we have created a mess on the front of infrastructure planning, isn’t it? In the very first place no living specie has to be required to migrate for survival on permanent basis but this is very noble thought or say ambitious planning but at least what we can do is minimize the migration & see that we plan a world where every specie may it be a tiger or a human will be able to love & prosper wherever they are & in-case they are required to migrate (which is law of nature) then there must be safe corridors for them as well proper habitats which we the humans call as towns while the tigers call them as the forests! And for that there it’s a high time we squash the term Urban Planning or Town Planning but we must call it as Habitat Planning, because Shakespeare might have said, what’s in the name but when its planning then the name indicates the purpose & the purpose will only decide our fate; I concluded with this note, wishing them all luck to make this world a better place as a Planner!

You can watch the sharing on YouTube link below…

https://youtu.be/jX8kJKhkWZc?si=x62CW_FsvtKrWQx4

Sanjay Deshpande

smd156812@gmail.com

Sanjeevani Dev.

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