High rises raise ecological concerns

A Jayaprakash Kovilloor

The high rises are creating in the real estate holdings a kind of compulsive psychological urge to acquire more and more. For the real estate giants, these lands are future harvesting grounds of unlimited fortune.

THE NUMBER of people who complain of respiratory, allergic and cancer symptoms is on the rise these days. There are many hailing from rural and semi-urban areas who complain that their normal life and physical well-being has been constantly threatened by the real estate holdings who raise villa, apartments, even integrated township projects in the suburban, semi-urban and even in rural landscapes.

The sound and fury, with which modern construction tools like concrete mixers, cranes, lift, crushers, earth movers and land levellers, take on the normal life of common man. The real estate boom is taking a serious toll on people who have nothing to do with the benefits of this so-called boom. Actually these people bear the brunt, and the affluent section of the society that comes to occupy these finished real estate products simply denies a greater section of the society their natural right for an ordinary peaceful life.

Apart from the health concerns, they are increasingly being put to many social and existential pressures. The groundwater reserves they have had for generations have started showing signs of receding, and many wells in the semi-urban and rural areas have started showing signs of drying up. The green cover, which they have maintained for ages, has already started vanishing. Along with that have gone by innumerable varieties of native and migratory birds and their habitats. Instead of cool winds, what these people now get is dust storm carrying cement; fine granite, ceramic and sand particles. Not to speak of the toxic paint and paste particles that gets mixed with the otherwise refreshing air.

The social life of the people is increasingly pressurised to adjust with a culture of carelessness, which in turn makes them sit and ponder over shifting to the fringes of their villages. This is a kind of forced displacement. The voice and concerns of these poor folks are hardly heard in the circles of power, and if one or two such voices happen to react, money, muscle, blackmail and politics ruthlessly crush them.

Many villagers have opted for outright selling of their property for whatever these mafias offer. They go packing to outer and still outer spaces of the land, exerting more pressure on the environment by way of further occupation of pristine soil and further removal of green covers. Thus our lush green God’s own landscape is getting occupied by concrete estates and jungles. 

This situation develops a psychological disorder in the hunter and the hunted. It creates in the hunter, the real estate holdings, a kind of ‘compulsive annexing psychosis’. They get frenzied when met with property worth millions being held by the less privileged in the society. What they do to solve this compulsive disorder is this: they simply approach the poor families and offer unimaginable prices for those stretches and patches of pristine lands they hold. For these people, the amount offered sounds like a fortune. For the real estate giants, these lands are future harvesting grounds of unlimited fortune. The psychological disorder faced by the hunted, the population that gets ousted, is called ‘forceful relocating syndrome’. The big bulldozes the small and the latter gets run over, and the former rules over the land forever. This is the beginning of an end, an ecological conundrum. 

This is nothing short of a disaster in the offing. It is a concern that touches upon health indices, ground water table, green cover, power grid, temperature rise, free flow of pure air and the aesthetics of a landscape, to mention a very few. The ecological imbalance it creates is powerful enough to keep the people of a place run for life. Are real estates adding anything real to the masses? They really scare the place and the people while they go caring for the luxuries of the nouveau riche. Therefore, real citizens, resist this real estate assault. Don’t look at governments and their corporation and local agencies. They are governed more by private will than by the vox populi, the voice of the people.