| discource and context
INDIA’S DISEMBEDDED RURAL LANDSCAPE
A.R. Vasavi
LA 70 |
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| Rural landscapes, across geographies in India, have often been considered as examples of sustainable development in context of planning, design and use of natural and economic resources. The article, while analysing their state of flux, notes responsible factors and explores possibilities of revival of some of these forgotten values.
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Degraded agricultural fields, dried lakes, shrunken streams, rivers and forests, mounds of plastic-filled waste, and concrete constructions of all sizes and hues. India’s rural landscapes, once the site of civilisational belonging, are now marked with severe ecological degradation. Instead of the diversity of land use, architecture, artifacts, and agro-climate based landscapes, we are now witness to the emergence of landscapes that encapsulate all the signs of both benign and malign neglect. Climate change, manifest in unpredictable and altered patterns of rainfall, increased temperatures, and decreasing biodiversity, exacerbates the extant of ecological exigencies. Several anthropogenic factors account for much of the rural landscapes now disembedded of their long-evolved agro-ecological economies, regionally specific conservation practices, community-based care, and locally evolved eco-sensitive architectural forms.
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