In the series of Mountain Voice project (Link: http://bit.ly/Lk8cE4 ) the Climate Himalaya (CHI), a Pan Himalayan knowledge network (www.chimalaya.org ) team interacted with youths in the western Himalayan region of India, to understand that how aware, concerned and involvedthey are about environmental issues.
During our interaction with a number of youths, we observed that in real sense our Youths are struggling forthe basic securities oflivelihood, food and shelter, while the environmental issues seem hobby of a few well off urbanites. The CHI team come to know that despite a number of claims about awakening among youths on environment issues, in real sense, our mountain youths are not really quite aware about them, while also not given chance to sincerely involve in various developmental processes and discourses.Then, does this mean that to catch the attention, we are using jargons?
From our interaction it also appears that rather going deeper in to the issues, and interacting with the youths in coordinated manner,our agencies working on social and environmental issues find ease with interacting with elite urban youths only, which shows the prejudices towards rural and semi urban one. This poses several questions related to involvement of those, who are already well off in terms of access to resources?
To understand this we captured the voices, so that other also know that how much we are interacting with, and involved in promoting youth in various environment and development processes in Himalayan region.The video leaves a number of question. Have a look and please share your comments/suggestions with us, by visiting the link: http://bit.ly/NfDoTG . You may also like to visit a number of informative videos from this project at http://bit.ly/Lk8cE4 .
K N Vajpai, Environment Specialist, Climate Himalaya Initiative , P.O. Silli, Agastyamuni, Rudraprayag, Uttarakhand, India www.chimalaya.org Email: vajpai@chimalaya.org
By. Kashi Nath Vajpai