Our clean green sister state sikkim

Home Sweet Home! There is no place like home! East or West, home’s the best! All these slogans are sweetly true. But when misused these sweet little phrases can get us into deep trouble, in the sense that it can make way for complacency about unwholesome state of affairs, at home, to creep into our skins. And in the history of mankind, we all know, smugness had not gotten anyone anywhere.

That is why when a privileged team of us had recently visited Sikkim and we chose to speak well of certain noteworthy things about our sister state, we sure were not saying the grass is greener on the other side, rather the team chose not to be complacent about our dear dear homeland and dearly wished it is our state which is worthy of emulation for other states instead of the opposite. In this article allow me to reflect on two points that strikingly stamps out our sister state Sikkim as worthy of being called a clean and green state.

The civic infrastructure laid down by the government of Sikkim is to be highly applauded. Nobody could have enjoyed the long ride along winding roads leading to dizzying heights of this state cradled in the lower Himalayas, had the roads not been smoothly tarred. Why, the Sikkimists don’t seem to know how to create potholes in their roads – this is something they can learn from our state. Though of course our roads are wider, it cannot be untrue that apart from traveling sicknesses one gets on our winding roads, our roads even the less than 100 KM National Highway between Dimapur and Kohima is capable of displacing some innards, if not bones, in a weakling, let alone backaches. No wonder some people stated that ‘there are no roads in Nagaland’.

But if some say there are no roads in Nagaland, and if the roads to our villages are dry and dusty and life-threateningly bumpy, you can be sure that the roads to the villages in Sikkim, at least to the ones our team visited, forget about the road in its towns, are paved and the footpaths are concrete. It is also worthy of mention that there is a concrete toilet and a bathroom and a water supply outlet (with running water, of course!) in every house in the village, no matter how rich or poor the household seems. Should we consider ourselves lucky that ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’ is not a scripture verse?

‘Clean’ and ‘Green’ are inseparable twins. Green is always clean in the truest environmental sense and if we see ‘clean’ there surely has been ‘green’ already. The Sikkimists again need to learn from us to ‘litter more’. Don’t they eat sweets, chew gums, etc., like us? Or have they already invented ‘sweet wrappers disappearing techniques’? Yet, the secret is already out on the international front. The ban on the use of plastic bags in Sikkim is known worldwide and the State already poses as a model and example for international communities to follow. Don’t you think it is high time plastic bags found its way out of Nagaland?

While it was even heart-wrenching to see some people of Sikkim starving away to protest against the construction of Dzongu dam that threatens to destroy its huge wealth of biodiversity, it is a huge relief that no big river flows across our state to cause such upheavals. Oops! I’m not saying that our government is ecologically irresponsible. We are all in the same boat! But what I did realize I intend to stress upon and that is that one of our (you and me – Nagas) greatest needs is ‘participatory democracy’. Surely, Sikkim has what we don’t have, which we need to have because their democratic approach is participatory in nature. And “In participatory democracy, citizens act in alliance with private and state institutions to influence not only the approaches and solutions to environmental problems but also social objectives, where the utopia of equal participation of all people in all political questions remains the ultimate goal”.

Ecology in the past was a little known discipline within biological sciences seemingly reserved for a few specialists but it is now no longer so. Realization must dawn on us that that it is now a new line of thought within the framework of cultural transformation. As stated by the Chilean political scientist Fernando Mires, it is “rather a world vision, a culture that is beginning to generate new hierarchies of values, new customs inspired by respect for the environment”.
These new hierarchies of values and customs have evolved into a system of ethics which leads to clean and green living. And at a time when we are all on the search for better lives it will help us to be aware and adopt ethics that inculcates clean green values.