Taking off from the documentary on former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth , Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2011 book, Convenient Action, Gujarat’s Response to Challenges of Climate Change , is being distributed by the Indian delegation here as part of the country’s official kit on India’s climate action.
The 226-page book published before the Cancun climate summit, has quotes from the Vedas, Swami Vivekanand and Mahatma Gandhi and even a poem by Mr. Modi, titled ‘Grateful’ which is about how grateful his eyes are that the earth is lovely. He says he drew his knowledge from the Atharva Veda which has 63 couplets composed thousands of years ago, that contain a whole spectrum of knowledge which is now being propounded as climate change. The underlying spirit is that of a mother-son relationship between man and earth, Mr. Modi writes.
He confesses in his introduction that he did read climate sceptics at first but he decided to focus on public policy and the book documents initiatives and innovations which have been undertaken in Gujarat over eight years. These have significantly contributed to the adaptation and mitigation of climate change, he claims.
