I wonder if ' Achchey din aaney waley hain' will extend to the flora and fauna of our country. Modi has brought about some change in attitudes amongst politicians and bureaucrats. I say this from personal experiences in the first 30 days of the new government coming to office.

But, dear reader, creating a swachcha mindset will take a lot of hard work; shifting focus from the filthy rich to the filthy poor, where the same adjective stretches from meaning awesome to revolting, will be a daunting task. Thank heavens it is now in the hands of the brave.

Cleaning up the Ganga and Jamuna can be a cosmetic exercise picnickers and tourists will sit back and admire from bajras and yachts, but the damming of Himalayan streams, the Bhagirathi included, can spell catastrophe in the lives of thousands of extremely poor and totally unknown peoples who will be displaced, compensated ridiculously and allowed to die ignominiously, in pathetic anonymity. Waterholes and fauna in streams that fed birds and animals perennially will disappear and while certain species may evolve, others will perish unnoticed, gone forever.

The River Lapwing whose distinctive shrill cry before dawn and sometimes into the night, over the Ganga and smaller rivers along the Shiwalik ranges near Deoprayag and Hrishikesh, may soon become a thing of the past. Climate change is driving Magpies from the higher ranges of the Himalayan foothills down to the Doon Valley. The Allied Grosbeak skipped Mussoorie last year and the annual Summer migration of Ladybirds over the River Aglar's Valleys, a significant contributor to ecological balances, is sparse and fractured this year.

The Valley is the new target of developers from Delhi who have, in any case, bought every square inch available on the road to Dhanaulti (about an hour from Mussoorie) and what else but filthily run hotels and pretentious cottages of the nouveau riche, will replace forests? Across the seven seas, the town of Seattle named after the famous 19th Century Native American Chieftain, whose Duwamish Tribe inhabited the State of Washington since glacial times, somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 BCE, and is no longer an officially recognised tribe in the United States of America, now houses both Microsoft's and Boeing's terrestrial headquarters - modern miracles of industry on our aching blue planet.

You don't have to be a believer to observe that the temple in Kedarnath was saved by a miracle. It absolutely was. You also don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that the incessant flying of choppers and the roar of their propellers and the sound vibrations they caused were instrumental for massive icecaps cracking, breaking and then tumbling down in an avalanche that caused the greatest disaster in our Dev Bhoomi's thousand-year-old history. I, for one, believe that man, and not nature, was the cause.

Call it superstition, coincidence or simply the wisdom of our nature-loving, nature-understanding and nature-worshipping ancestors but, of the thousands who perished in the landfalls and landslides along the pilgrim route to Kedarnath, the vast majority died in ill-conceived and cheap and ugly constructions built by corrupt businessmen, half-baked hoteliers and unscrupulous town officials. The ancient chattis were safe and the panic-stricken survivors who took shelter there because they couldn't afford to live in the little pockets of comparative creature-comfort created by unscrupulous Banias and the department of tourism's sightless visionaries, lived to tell the tale. Hundreds of years ago, our ancestors had studied natural phenomena and picked the chattis, where weary pilgrims would rest for a night, carefully.

So where do we begin? The plight of human existence overshadows all our good intentions to prevent cruelty to animals and protect our environment from what one can only describe as systemic decimation. Allegedly, some powerful people part-owned the helicopter company that evacuated survivors and carried back our dead from the Kedar Valley, and made a killing from the Congress government of Uttarakhand who paid them handsomely. I won't go into details here simply because, if they're true, they descend into depths of depravity and disgrace and profiteering in the midst of human tragedy that I feel ashamed to divulge.

I also know that those powerful people and their proliferating ilk wouldn't give a damn about, or even be aware of, the fact that the land they were acquiring, might be an elephant corridor or a water body for thousands of migratory birds or simple forest land that provides sustenance to Rhesus Monkeys and Langurs who now have to depend on, and live on, handouts from well-meaning God-fearing sinners, who throw unnatural foods at them from the windows of tour busses along our pilgrim routes.

Unlike most of you, I have the good fortune to live in the open country where my enemies are nut-raiding Flying Fox Squirrels, bird-bath-dirtying Jungle Crows, Pigmy Owlets who wake up earlier than they should, Thrushes and Blackbirds who, while I cover my ears under my pillow, drown each other's song before daybreak, a cacophonous Himalayan Barbet that jealously tries to match the hour-long monotony of the brain fever Cuckoo and the albatross-of-a-bearded-Lammergeyer Vulture who circles way above Serpent and Black Eagles, waiting for senior citizens to breathe their last on the slopes below. I know; you envy me.

Wait till you get stung by a lazy scorpion who feels he has a right to hibernate in your shoe, or be bitten by one of a thousand varieties of blood-sucking Tabanid Horse Flys, or take your socks off to discover a dozen full-bellied leeches lowering your BP while you are already on prescription beta blockers, or be hit by a low-flying Magpie diving down upon a hawkmoth resting under the lamp above your front door, and you will any day prefer to sit in the air-conditioned luxury of Priya Cinema hall and watch pretentious cinema that often hurts no one and nothing except the aesthetics of a minority who possess it. Go on, smile. C'est la vie.

Having the privilege and honour of penning a few words about our 'Land of the Gods', that will probably be generously published somewhere, I want to take this opportunity to tell you that Uttarakhand is limping back to normalcy after last year's devastation and badly needs the return of the Bengali tourist who for decades has been the principal source of the region's daily bread and butter - not just along the pilgrim routes but also the awesome trekking paths.

Not only is Uttarakhand exciting and completely safe to travel in and hike around but, courageous Bengalis will discover that they are, almost everywhere, all by themselves, simply because the faint-hearted from other parts of India fear to tread upon or traverse the infamous Tectonic Doon Fault. Before the rest of India plucks up the courage to come back to Garhwal and Kumaon, the rivers and valleys here have gone back in years to their verdant and uninhabited splendour of yesteryear and present a paradise whose beckoning you must not ignore or miss. Spread the word. Come quickly.

Birding is now fast gaining in popularity and I know some of you are keen bird watchers and so must inform you that of the 1,200-odd species of birds in our subcontinent, over 650 are permanent residents of Uttarakhand, waiting to rouse you with sparkling birdsong at dawn and mellifluously put you to sleep with their evensong and leave you to tell the time with regulated hoots from a variety of soft-spoken, non-screechy, owls and owlets, right through our moon and star-bathed nights.

I end with a solemn warning to landlubbers and land grabbers. 'When the green hills are covered with talking wires and the wolves no longer sing, what good will the money you paid for our land be then?', are the forgotten words of Chief Seattle.

The writer is Uttarakhand's brand ambassador of the Bird-Watching Programme