Saturday 2-4 pm, May 18, 2013
MIT Room 3-133
http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=3
Speakers: Jayanta Bandyopadhyay and Nazrul Islam
Jayanta Bandyopadhya, environmental activist and professor, author of fourteen critically acclaimed books, is the former head of the Center for Development and Environment Policy at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta.
Nazrul Islam, the senior economist at the UN, is the author of several books on prospects for development in Bangladesh and China. He is the coordinator of Bangladesh Environment Network ( BEN ), a global organization of Bangladeshi citizens, expatriates, and friends of Bangladesh dedicated to protecting the environment in Bangladesh.
Recent experience in South Asia demonstrates that rivers are not objects to be “conquered” and “consumed”. The harvesting of river resources must not entail fundamental changes to the natural course and flow of rivers.
Big dams have proven to incur great costs to a country and provide only questionable benefit. Dams on multiple rivers upstream have damaged vast areas in India and even more in the lower riparian country Bangladesh.
In particular, the mammoth Inter Linking of Rivers project ( ILRP ) initiated by the Govt of India is likely to cause irreversible damage to both India and Bangladesh.
Organized by:
Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia (www.southAsiaAlliance.org)
Association for India’s Development MIT & Boston Chapters (www.aidboston.org)
Bangladesh Environment Network (www.ben-global.org)
The South Asia Forum at MIT
Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia 