By Col Sugandh Sharma (Retd)
The residents of Doon face rising temperatures these days which are very easy to blame on global warming but how have we, the government as well as the citizens contributed to it, and is there something that we can do about it?
In the development plan the largest chunk of Doon is classified as a mixed area and extremely small pockets are classified as exclusively residential, institutional or commercial areas. What this means is that almost in the entire area you can have Commercial Complexes. Greenery in such areas unsurprisingly goes for a toss.
Then is the blatant concretisation of the town. Most houses have now got concrete paving in courtyards and pathways. Do an experiment and touch a concrete pathway half an hour after sunset and then touch gravel or lawn at the same time. Then do it again around midnight. How it affects the temperature will immediately become apparent.
The other problem is the roofs of the houses. Do a similar experiment, as in the previous paragraph, with a tin roof and a concrete roof and again the perpetrator will get identified. What will happen in tin roof in daytime and winter nights will be the query, for which Doonites by default have arrived at the double roof, concrete under tin solution originally created for fighting seepage in roofs.
Another hitch is uncontrolled construction of boundary walls. Earlier, Dehradun had hedges wherein the entire town had good ventilation for obvious reasons. Now boundary walls are permitted, actually only up to a certain height but nobody follows or enforces this, and they are typically higher thus preventing ventilation in the city.
Then in the name of development we have connected every road with every other road. In any town planning, the main arteries are supposed to run unhindered, but the branch roads are meant to have dead ends. The residential areas are supposed to be on these roads which have dead ends so that the residents only face the traffic of those living on that road. Since this is not implemented you have traffic of other areas going in front of your houses, consequently the temperature also goes up.
Besides, there is complete concretisation of houses, roads and commercial areas. We all know that we are in a hill state therefore the groundwater is quite low. The moment you do concretisation, rainwater does not get space to get absorbed into the ground. So, the groundwater reduces drastically from one year to the next. When the groundwater is reducing so drastically, the vegetation on the surface also does not survive very well. Yet again, the temperature goes up.
The learned readers will have realised by now that solutions to the problem exist, provided we, the citizens and the government, wish to do something about it.
(Col Sugandh Sharma was born and brought up in Dehradun, He served the country for over three decades including at the international level. Doon, particularly its history and environs, are very close to his heart.)
