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Sahyadri e-news is CES-ENVIS's quarterly newsletter, covering the issues related to Western Ghats biodiversity. Western Ghats is rich in diversity of life. Due to unplanned developmental activities, its ecological resource base is under threat, with extensive destruction of natural habitats, widespread degradation of ecosystems and a growing burden of air and water pollution. Simultaneously, knowledge base of uses of biodiversity is also being eroded, with the present generation becoming increasingly alienated from the natural world.
We need to carefully plan on conserving, sustainably using and restoring the biological diversity of the Western Ghats. We also need to conserve and benefit from the knowledge of uses and the traditions of conservation of this biological diversity. Also, we must ensure that benefits flowing from our heritage of biodiversity and related folk knowledge percolate down to the people at the grass-roots.
We live in exciting times, with technological developments transforming the world around us as never before. Communication has become easy; information in large measures is becoming readily accessible. Indians are taking good advantage of many of these developments, and have become significant actors in the field of information technology. Yet Indian language applications are lagging far behind and most Indians are yet to taste the fruits of the information revolution. Over the last half-century we have acquired an in-depth understanding of life processes. This is permitting us to design novel life forms, injecting bacterial genes into cotton plants, or getting goats to produce milk containing molecules of spider silk. India, too, is part of this revolution and, Biotechnology is beginning to pick up in our country. Yet, in the midst of all these developments, we remain a biomass-based civilization. Many Indians continue to lead lives as ecosystem people, tied closely to the resources of their environment to fulfill many of their requirements. They cultivate a wide range of plant species and varieties, consume wild fruit and fish, use fuel-wood to cook their meals and grass to thatch their huts and cowsheds, extensively employ herbal remedies and worship peepal trees and hanuman langurs. We are also a nation rich in knowledge of uses of our living resources, ranging from the classical traditions of Ayurveda, Siddha and Yunani, to folk medicinal practices and uses of vegetable perfumes, cosmetics and dyes. But our country's ecological resource base is under threat, with extensive destruction of natural habitats, widespread degradation of agro-ecosystems and a growing burden of air and water pollution. Simultaneously, India's knowledge base of uses of biodiversity is also being eroded, with the younger generation becoming increasingly alienated from the natural world.
Prof. Madhav Gadgil, Yogesh Gokhale, P.R.Seshagiri Rao, (in collaboration with members of PBR Network) Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, discuss the "People's Biodiversity Register", An Apt Activity for the Year of Scientific Awareness 2004, in this issue. Preparation of “People's Biodiversity Registers (PBR)” will be a rather unusual scientific activity. But it will be an activity that is very much appropriate to our biodiversity rich country, and very much timely in the current era of rapid technological developments.