same year, then U.S. President Bill Clinton visited Agra to sign an envi-
ronmental agreement providing $45 million for energy-efficiency pro-
grams in India. “Pollution,” he said, “has managed to do what 350
years of wars, invasions and natural disasters have failed to do. It has
begun to mar the magnificent walls of the Taj Mahal.” Clinton decried
the “marble cancer” that had begun to erode the building. “I can’t help
wondering that if a stone can get cancer, what kind of damage can this
pollution do to children,” he said.
There is a general sense in India that the “fog” is a natural phe-
nomenon, an impression mirrored in India’s chauvinistic press. In the
Indian Express, for example, Dr. J. G. Negi of the National Geophysical
Research Institute opined recently that India “has nothing to worry
about” when it comes to global warming, since India does not produce
much greenhouse gas and, anyway, the higher levels of carbon dioxide
will lead to “increased vegetation.” Instead of a warmer planet, Dr. Negi
thinks we will be in the grip of a new Ice Age by 2010.
In fact, however, India is the world’s fifth-largest producer of global
warming gas (the United States is first), and emissions there are
bound to get worse as the population soars past one billion and private
car sales (up 58 percent between 1998 and 1999) skyrocket.
Early signs that the climate is already changing are abundant. In
1999, a heat wave killed hundreds of people and led to thousands of
new cases of gastroenteritis and cholera in New Delhi. Major droughts
hit the eastern Orissa state in both 1999 and 1998, the latter resulting
in two thousand deaths. The heat wave continued into 2000, affecting
some fifty million people. Record temperatures dried up wells, rivers,
and streams and resulted in water crises in eleven of India’s thirty-one
states. In hard-hit Orissa, temperatures reached 118° F. Government
offices closed in the afternoon, trains carrying drinking water were
mobbed, and prisoners rioted, shouting, “Give us water or kill us!”
In 2002, the country was devastated by large floods that killed
thousands of people in eastern states, and renewed heat waves and
drought in much of the country. The India Meteorological Department
described 2002 as “the first all-India drought year” since 1987. One of
the wettest places on earth, the Khasi Hills of northeast India, once set
a record with a rainfall of 1,000 inches in a year. But by 2003 it was
82 Jim Motavalli