Right up there with dynamite and the atomic bomb. There’s nothing as chilling as the approach of the JCB.
In a few hours, it can raze an entire landscape: trees, rocks, hillsides, water courses. And yet, there’s no one regulating its use. Any individual can flatten any landform he takes a dislike to. In the last few months, our bucolic surroundings have become a network of flattened lands for sale, connected by four-lane kaccha roads that until recently were footpaths. While I cannot deny that I’ve ‘benefitted’ from the ‘development’ I deplore now, nor the right of the farmers to their share of whatever’s going, I wish our neighbours could see into the future. They don’t know how precious or fragile are the goods they are so eager to sell off.
14th August: On further investigation, I find that our rural neighbours are more intelligent than the urban ones: each of these roads has a ditch running along each side, and at the bottom of each slope, provision has been made for water to run off in its natural direction, towards the lake. A good discovery to make on the eve of Independence Day!
Water was the Earth and to water it may return. Humans as we are today and our technologies may then be a dot in the timeline of evolution.
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In a way, that’s a consoling thought.
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Modern Western culture, unfortunately, looks at land and nature as something to be used and discarded.
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So what do we do, the ones who don’t subscribe to this view?
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It is definitely interesting that regulative policies have resulted in positive good for productive landowners, and new policies of unregulated use are yielding destruction. Please, tell me what I am missing!
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I really feel that things with such destructive potential should be under the control of a protective agency. Though individual trees, as well as forests and wildlife, are protected by the Forest Department in India, trees are constantly cut down illegally Similarly, all rocks and mineral rights are supposed to belong to the government, but in actual fact it’s a free for all. As far as I know there is no law protecting hills or water courses which are not rivers. Which is why it would be a good thing to produce fewer earth movers and strictly control their activites. In rural India, people are just drunk with the power of the JCB. It’s the newest god in our pantheon.
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Arrgh! Are you sure India and the USA didn’t go to school together. They have tbe same government theme song! (GTS). It all sounds way too familiar.
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😁😁
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May I add the borewell drill lorry to the list?
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Absolutely! That’s one more of them.
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