From the large-scale eco-friendly practices to the timeless wisdom of Bharatiya traditions, Mahakumbh offered a new model for development in harmony with nature

The Valeriepieris Circle is a fascinating concept. Imagine a circle on the world map. The circle is centered around the Beibu Gulf, off the east coast of Vietnam, has a radius of 4,000 kilometers, and includes Southern China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Now this is where it gets stupefying. This circle covers just about 9 per cent of the world’s land-mass, but over 50 per cent of the world’s population.

This simple reality, clubbed with colonial impoverishment, explains why many people in this circle lived in filth and squalor. Most “progressive” thoughts therefore, be it sustainability, development, environment, innovation, or education, came from the “developed west”. We, the unwashed and the uncouth plebs, lapped these ideas up.

These imported ideas however, played out terribly. Not just for people, but for the planet. So much so, that escaping this planet seems to be the primary focus of the biggest billionaires from the west. Talk about a fence eating its own crop!

Kumbh on the other hand is a metaphor for the alternate model. A moksha, if you will, from the destruction-premised development models from the west. Prayagraj, a city with a population of 1.4 million saw over 500 million visiting it over a month. To put that in context, imagine a flat typical urban flat that houses a family of four, suddenly visited by 1,400 people. This is indeed Valeriepieris Circle on steroids, and any other city would have crumbled a 1,400x overload. Not just did the city manage, but actually offered solutions for how humanity could manage an explosion of demand quite sustainably.

Those of us that experienced the Kumbh personally will tell you the level of cleanliness that has been maintained. We have noticed the extensive use of bamboo instead of plastic, of jute rugs instead of astroturf, of manual boats instead of diesel motors, of e-rickshaws instead of fossil-fuel vehicles, of free refillable RO purified water instead of disposable mineral water bottles. Half a billion people used donas (cups made of dried leaves) in contrast to small birthday parties in “developed” countries serving single-use plastic.

What you didn’t see perhaps was India’s largest plastic buy-back program aimed at recycling, or leftover prasad being shared with animals as fodder, or compactor trucks working round the clock, or solar-powered sewage treatment plants.

The invisible sustainability efforts of the Kumbh were perhaps the silent hero that emerged naturally from a culture that values interdependence with nature at its core.

The recently concluded Kumbh Global Summit on Sustainability explained the phenomenon and drew lessons from our rich history and culture. Ministers from a dozen Girmitiya nations shared their learnings around sustainability, most of it rooted in ancient Bharatiya wisdom.

The Minister of Tourism and Culture Gajendra Singh Shekhawat brought in simple, rooted wisdom from something as intrinsic as sustainability inbuilt into language itself. The word “dohan” (to milk a  cow) comes from “do+han” the norm to milk just two teats of a cow, leaving the rest for the calf. Contrast that to industrial-grade milk production from hormone-ridden cows that has been normalised in the “developed” west. Ram Madhav proposed a sangam (confluence) of ancient Indic wisdom with modern practices, without which the world’s sustainability crisis can never be avoided.

He highlighted that environment and sustainability are challenges that cannot be solved at COP summits along, but actually need a convergence of the richest ideas globally. The urgency of the summit was encapsulated most eloquently by Suresh Prabhu who framed an enquiry - with thousands of years of history and knowledge across the world, can we even be sure that we will last another hundred years?

Gas-guzzling economies of the West will continue to posture around sustainability as a virtue-signaling badge. They will postulate, make loud visible pledges, and fly into sustainability summits on their private jets. The minerals-filching economies east of us will ignore calls to action and give you the silent treatment. They will continue to live the delusion that they are communist nations, while going out their way to display toxic capitalism, much to the peril of their people and our earth.

As Bharat, we have to accept a simple reality - What broke it, can’t fix it. Period! Bharat has the unique civilisational advantage of leveraging our ancient wisdom to actually demonstrate that you can actually develop infrastructure at scale (like at the Kumbh) without bludgeoning mother nature with a hammer.

As we attain maturity on the world stage, we neither need to twirl our moustache, nor cover up our acne. We would rather focus on the purity of our soul as the thought model we export. We would rather focus on our civilisational value of attaining balance.

 As PM Narendra Modi’s statement for the summit said, the only way to achieve global sustainability is to follow a simple, yet powerful principle, “Vikas bhi, Virasat bhi”.

(The writer is a nominated Member of the National Tourism Advisory Council and the co-founder of India Pride Project; views are personal)