The pursuit of more and more of the less and less we have…

Doing nothing on the Sunday evening, scrolling YouTube and watching the subscriptions that I have, I stumbled upon the following and watching it made me realize, how emerging are we in our thoughts about our country. In the name of progress, we are being forced by forces unseen to dam the mighty Drangme Chu. All the other major river systems are dammed or beginning to be dammed. I am neither a hydro power specialist nor a development economist but my little brain and logic tells me, it is wrong to dam the Drangme chu and a bad idea to listen to others about damming it.

Image Courtesy: Google

The pursuit of gaining more and more from the little that we have is capitalism on steroids. The unending greed of yearly policies that is being push forward is shrinking the little environment and ecosystems that we boast of. We cannot proudly declare 70 percent of the land under forest cover is mandated by the constitution and forget about the river systems that are interlinked and symbiotic in their existence. Without one the other cannot survive.  

You and I witnessed how troublesome were the years due to the Covid-19 pandemic which was an imported issue. People panicked, many lost their jobs, the economic hub of country came to an eerie standstill and many more, you name it. If the government go ahead with damming the mighty river of the east, the temporary relief may come in the form of revenues for some years. We have been told time and again, glaciers are melting ‘sey’. If they are, what will our lakes and glaciers hold during our children’s time.

Imagine the sustainability of such project when climate change sells like hot cakes in every international conferences at the UN. The power hungry neighbor of ours will only facilitate such projects if they benefit from the export of our electricity at the rate decided by them.

Ten years into the future from now, I would like to tell my kids that, the Golden Mahseer, the chocolate mahseer and the Snow trout are native to the Drangme Chu instead, before the dam came up, all these were there. I don’t know who coined the term climate change or what will it do to our lives and whether or not if climate change is a hoax, but what I know is we have to live through climate whether changing or not. The damming of the Drangme Chu will be a move towards our own haste towards climate change in Bhutan.

I am neither trying to make any political influence of any sort nor trying to petition against the damming of the only free flowing river of our country, I am just trying to put through a humble opinion about the issues concerning every nation in the Himalayas...

You are advised to draw your own conclusion after watching the following video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjw0zfDAvSE

And thank you for dropping by…!