The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Environmental studies made must for degree students

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, May 03, 2004

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Environmental studies made must for degree students

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE, MAY 2. From the next academic year, B.A., B.Sc., and B.Com. students of Bangalore University will have to compulsorily study a separate 100-mark paper on environmental studies. The university introduced the subject on the directions of the Supreme Court.

The subject is likely to be part of the curriculum in the third or fourth semester of the undergraduate programmes. A final decision on this will be taken next week. However, B.Sc., students with Environmental Science as a subject will be exempted from the new paper.

The proposed syllabus covers units on the multidisciplinary nature of environmental studies, renewable and non-renewable resources, ecosystems, biodiversity and its conservation, environmental pollution, social issues and the environment, human population and the environment, besides field work.

Under natural resources, the paper will dwell upon forest, water, mineral, food, energy, and land resources, role of an individual in conservation of natural resources and equitable use of resources for sustainable lifestyles. Eight lectures are devoted for this unit.

The ecosystem unit covers issues of forest, grassland, desert and aquatic ecosystems, apart from energy flow, ecological succession, and the cycle from producers to decomposers. This will be covered in six lectures.

The biodiversity section touches upon the bio-geographical classification of the country, hotspots of biodiversity, endangered and endemic species of India.

The section on environmental pollution goes into the causes, effects, and control measures of air, water, soil, marine, noise and thermal pollutions besides nuclear hazards.

The seven lecture unit on social issues and the environment covers sustainable development, urban problems related to energy, water conservation, rain water harvesting, watershed management, wasteland reclamation, environment protection Act, Wildlife Protection Act, Forest Conservation Act, global warming, and acid rain. The section on population, with six lectures, covers population growth and explosion, human rights, value education, HIV/AIDS, women and child welfare, and role of information technology in environment and human health.

As part of the fieldwork, the students will have to visit a local area to document environmental assets such as a river, forest, grassland, hill, mountain or a local polluted site study common plants, insects and birds and the simple ecosystems of ponds, river and hill slopes.

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