The cover image of a crimson sunbird perched precariously on a tree branch on what looks like a wet monsoon morning, is alluring enough. And then the name, “A Breath of Fresh Air”, adds to your temptation and you pick this colourful picture book which to any reader clearly looks like a celebration of nature. Run your fingers through it and what you find is an impressive string of images — of birds, both local and migratory, water bodies brimming with tranquillity and herbs and plants in varied hues. The over-100 page tome in the shape of a school goer's drawing book, documents the flora and fauna of the eco-parks spread around 10 refineries of the lubricant giant, Indian Oil. It comes with an exhaustive list of the winged creatures exclusive to each refinery.
What's equally engaging is the text that couples the pictures, say for instance, the lore behind how its Digboi refinery — India's first and Asia's oldest, gained its name. The story goes that when the first oil well was dug in this remote area in upper Assam in 1889, the British handlers kept on shouting to the labourers to “Dig-boy-dig” till they unearthed crude oil; this shout later was jumbled together to name the refinery township Digboi.
Fills in N. Shiva Kumar, an Indian Oil employee and the book's editor, “To bring alive the times, I have also added a picture of a hunted tiger near the refinery to the chapter on Digboi. The area was then a sheet of steaming impenetrable forests teeming with wildlife and the employees lived in a typically colonial frontier life with shikar and fishing.”
An ardent birder, he says the idea for the book was given to him by the birds themselves. “It so happened that I was posted at the Mathura refinery and noticed innumerable land birds and water birds freely roaming within the premises of the high security refinery. Being an avid amateur ornithologist and with a hobby like wildlife photography, I was pleasantly surprised that the 1,000 odd acres of the refinery had plenty of tall trees and lush green patches have become perfect habitats for wild birds.” Kumar soon reached out to a senior scientist from Bombay Natural History Society (Kumar is a life member of BNHS) to take a look at the rich bird life in the refinery. Over 100 birds were sighted and a small pocket booklet on the birds of Mathura refinery was published in 1997. “The Breath of Fresh Air” is an extension of this initiative.
Field visits
For this book, Kumar crisscrossed the refinery campuses for about a year, photographing birds and plants, which ran up to 294 species of birds and 284 species of plants. To insert details of the flora and fauna recorded in the past, he took help from the company's Environmental Cell too. He also bestows credit for it to the book's foreword writer, Anand Kumar, the director of Indian Oil's R& D centre at Faridabad, who has been instrumental in setting up many eco-parks in the company's refineries.
“Many bosses came and went without showing any interest in pushing the idea. Finally, Anand Kumar allowed it to hatch in 2009,” states Kumar. The book, he categorically states, also silences the criticism that Indian Oil faced with its Matura refinery years ago. It was accused of being a potent environmental threat to the Taj Mahal then. Kumar's book underlines, “To demonstrate its commitment to keep the Taj Trapezium Zone unpolluted, the refinery planted more than 100,000 trees in the Taj reserve forest near the monument. The polishing pond of its treatment plant, which is the last point where the cleaned effluent is stored, has become a haven for nesting birds during the monsoons. The BNHS, which surveyed the area during the 1995-96, found painted storks, spoonbills, egrets, herons, kingfishers, cormorants, ducks and lapwings nesting here.”
He signs off with a hope in the heart, “I would be happy if a second edition of the book with even more details can be brought out by Indian Oil to drive home the point that any industry cannot only manufacture petroleum products and not give back to nature from which it has profited.”
