Green Options

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Tucked away in the northeastern most part of India, with snow-capped Himalayas in the north and the plains of Brahamaputra river valley in the south is the diversity rich state of Aruanachal Pradesh. But for its geographic location and other political factors, the state would have been an ideal eco-tourism destination and an ultimate getaway for the rest of India and the world.

Presently, it’s a region hidden away from repeated human intervention, aptly tagged: Paradise Unexplored! Such is the lack of information about the biodiversity of Arunachal Pradesh that the Arunachal Macaque (Macaca munzala) - a species of monkey already known to the native people of Arunachal as Munzala or the “monkey of the deep forest”, remained unknown to scientists and biologists till it was “discovered” in 2004. The so called “discovery” was waiting to happen and it was after more than a hundred years that a new species of macaque was discovered (the last recent discovery being the Indonesian Pagai Island Macaque in 1903).

Now, for the past few years, the Prime Minister of India has had a vision. A vision to make India energy secure. And this is to be achieved beyond just the Indo-US nuclear deal, by tapping the over 50,000 MW hydroelectric potential from the state of Arunachal Pradesh.

As part of the ‘International Earth Day’ week being celebrated here at EcoWorldly, there were a lot of E-Day events and happenings from Delhi, India that I wanted to share with the readers. I wanted to talk about the screening of the documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ at the American Center here in Delhi followed by a dicussion that shifted from Clean Development Mechanism (and the lack thereof) to the pollution in the city and/or the various tree plantation drives that took place in large number of schools here. More than that, I wanted to vividly illustrate the real time ‘eco’tourism being carried out at the Mandakini Magpie Bird Watcher’s Camp in the Himalayas as an excellent tool for biodiversity conservation. But then, there was something that caught my eye this afternoon.